Global South Asia

Sumit Guha, Padma Kaimal, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Anand A. Yang, Padma Kaimal, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Anand A. Yang

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780295746234
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization. Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.

1The Construction of Collective Memory

Sites and Processes

INVOKING THE MEMORY OF A “HISTORICAL” PAST INVOLVES SEVERAL different usages of the terms “past” and “history” that are often rhetorically conflated. As a result of that conflation of meanings, “the past” is often thought to be a transparent and unproblematic term. Everyday speech refers so readily to “the past” as equivalent to “history” (and many historians do so as well) that this may seem a trivial distinction. But this is a fallacious idea. The idea that the past is constantly extant and therefore known or knowable is an untenable one. We have, at minimum, three pasts: the grammatical past, the narrative past, and the historical narration of a past. The grammatical past is a feature of natural language: it is a statement made in a past tense (and there may be more than one such tense). The narrative past is a retelling of events in a past tense—a narration that may be openly imaginary or that may lay claim to reality. If verified by protocols relevant to the world of knowledge of its time, the latter type may graduate to recognition as a historical narration of the past. But that status is always open to revision. Therefore, since “the past” is a reconstruction, so must history also be.¹

If a defender of the monumental view of the past argues that the possibility of making true statements about “the past” exists, then knowledge of the past exists somewhere, and the true statement is drawn from that stock of knowledge. This implies that there is an entity, a matrix that holds said knowledge of all the past—a store increased every instant as the present slides into the past and today slips into yesterday. “The past” is thus implicitly defined as the sum of all such instants. But in our world, no living individual and no single archive or database contains or records such total knowledge. If it indeed does exist, we are already in that matrix and cannot know it.² It follows, then, that as far as we humans are concerned, there is no “past” out there somewhere. We have to work to build a narrative of it. Once built, it has to be propagated and replicated; that is what gives us social memory. A modern subset of that is historical memory, whose institutional construction is the main theme of this book.

Of course, not every statement in the past tense claims to be about a historical past. The historical past must refer to a unique location in time and space. This kind of past is a category (in today’s parlance, “a real thing”) that exists only once one admits the reality of time. The question of time and its nature was the subject of extensive debate in the Indian philosophical tradition. One stream of that tradition, that of Advaita Vedānta, systematically problematized time in order to maintain the nonduality of true Being. Consequently, it had to reject the ontological existence or reality of a past or future. The strongest defense of the reality of universal time and space came from the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school. The historian Anindita Balslev summarizes its view as follows: All events are events in time. Time must therefore be granted a separate existence. Causal explanation—or at any rate the tracing of a sequence of causes and effects—is invoked by historical narrative, insofar as it is presented as a sequence of actions and their outcomes. Even in early Indian tradition, the historical past was the subject of itihāsa (a term usually translated as history).³ We shall return to this theme later in this chapter.

Meanwhile, what may be termed “Abrahamic” religious philosophies necessarily developed a linear outlook on time that began with God’s creation of the universe. Furthermore, as the span of human time was based on counting generations in the Hebrew Bible, so it had a very short chronology of some seven thousand years from creation to the present.⁴ A secularized version of such unitary, God-created time continued to inform much Western philosophical thought, infecting even contemporary metaphilosophical works, like Paul Ricoeur’s boldly titled The Reality of the Historical Past (1985). This book still began by assuming the existence of a past, if only as a body of past thoughts. Ricoeur proposed that historical study is based on reading “traces” of a past. Historians, he claimed, believe that it is this reading of traces (I would say “documents”) that distinguishes their efforts from the imaginative fictions of novelists. Ricoeur then asked, “What does the term ‘real’ signify when it is applied to the historical past? What do we mean to say when we say that something really happened?” Ricoeur argued that historians work by successively moving from the archive whence they extracted the document to the document itself, to their valuing it as a “trace” of the past. But, he adds, they do not linger over the enigma of how the “trace” connects to the past, or consider the essentially indirect character of the connection. He asks, “Of what exactly are documents the trace? Essentially of the ‘inside’ of events, which has to be called thought.” He argues that when historians speak of the surviving trace, that statement is meaningless by itself. The traced past must, he claims, be reconstructed by reenactment. He continues that as the trace was originally a thought, a reenactment thus amounts to rethinking that thought. “All that is finally meaningful is the current possession of the activity of the past.”⁵ Implicitly, then, there was an unquestionably real past that has left us its thoughts embodied in documents and artifacts.

Ricoeur had a limited understanding of historical evidence, much of which was never the “thought” of any past sentient being. This was, perhaps, because he derived his idea of historical practice solely from the part-time archaeologist and full-time idealist philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943).⁶ Collingwood claimed that archaeologists differed from paleontologists in that the former always interpreted human remains as evidence of the thoughts and intentions of past humans. The latter, on the other hand, dealt with the remains of animals devoid of thought. Archaeology belonged to history, paleontology to nature. All history was the history of human events, and the historian’s object was to recover the thought (intention) present in the event. So all history was history of thought. That was why Collingwood claimed that past thought could be recovered only by its reenactment in the mind of the historian.⁷

I agree with Ricoeur and Collingwood that historical assessment of the truth of a narrative set in some past time is based not on direct knowledge but on the evidence, that is to say, the body of relevant traces. Recovering the worldview that is embedded in evidence is often an important procedure. But analyzing evidence is a much larger enterprise than “re-thinking,” one by one, the thoughts embodied in each document or “trace.” Archaeology offers the clearest example of this. For example, the geographical distribution of Painted Grey Ware pottery across North India in the fifth century BCE enables us to understand the emerging cultural unification of the region. But no individual living in that epoch could have observed that distribution. Similarly, we may now study the varying width of growth rings in long-lived trees as historical evidence of past rainfall fluctuations over periods longer than the life span of any human. Equally, the advance of sister disciplines (X-rays or microscopes, for example) has added to the body of traces of the past available to historians. Historical narrative is an architectural “construction,” but it is one constrained by the materials at hand—and the architect does not make bricks or cast pillars.

A more fruitful way of thinking about the constitution of historical memory draws on the pioneering work of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs.⁸ All historical consideration of the processes that shape memory must start from his analysis. Halbwachs sought to integrate the then-emerging science of social psychology with his concept of community memory. He argued that memory was not something naturally extant but was “reconstructed under the pressure of society.”⁹ Almost a century of psychological research after Halbwachs has solidly supported his claim. “Remembering” is not an act of retrieval, but of reconstruction. That reconstructive process is where mistakes, such as the implanting of false memories, occur. Experimental psychologists have long known of the phenomenon of false or implanted memory. But obviously, demonstrating falsity depends on our capacity to recover authentic truth. So if the memory claims to be a statement of fact, then it is open to interrogation—even first-person eyewitness narrative may be questioned. Eyewitness testimony has failed scrutiny more than once.¹⁰ Modern psychology has established even more solidly that even recent personal memory is not constantly available to the witness, that it must be reconstructed, and it may be falsified in the effort of recovery. As the forensic psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and James Doyle describe it, “Sometimes information was never stored to begin with. Sometimes interference prevents memory from emerging to consciousness. Sometimes witnesses wish to forget; sometimes they are temporarily unable to retrieve. . . . Moreover, another force, known as a constructive force, is also at work. People seem to be able to take bits and pieces of their experience and integrate them to construct objects that they never saw and events that never really happened.”¹¹

The above was written of the individual eyewitness in a judicial setting. Social memory undergoes yet further modification. Some of Halbwachs’s major work was on the tortured history of Palestine from Roman times to the nineteenth century. This was a land of multiple claims and clashing narratives fragmentarily preserved in hagiography, archaeology, and religious polemic through two millennia. Deploying an immense erudition, he carefully unpicked the many layers of memory that overlaid the holy sites in Palestine, from Iron Age Jewish kingdoms through successive appropriation by Roman, Romano-Christian, and Islamic communities as each came to control the sites. Halbwachs was born soon after Prussia’s defeat of France (1871) transferred the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine from France to the German Reich, where they remained till France retook them in 1919. The region was a target of German revanchisme in the 1930s. Teaching at Strasbourg, an old town where the university had only just been remodeled along “French” lines in the 1930s, Halbwachs was well aware of how sites of memory were subject to the accidents of history.

In a sentence from which I have drawn for the title of this book, he wrote: “We can remember the past only on condition of retrieving the position of past events that interest us from the frameworks of collective memory.”¹² Social memory, however, provides only the frame that both validates and invalidates the recollection of past events. Halbwachs worked from the social psychology of the 1930s. He was therefore deeply influenced by the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). Durkheim was especially concerned with the conditions under which social cohesion was generated in an intrinsically atomized industrial society. As a Durkheimian, Halbwachs frequently and unselfconsciously represented “society” as an active agent that pruned and structured its collective memory. He also, however, recognized that social groups were shaped, or indeed defined, by their distinctive reconstruction of common memory. The examples of such groups he gives are families, religious communities, and social classes. These, he argued, tend to pull “society” apart. But the latter’s efforts at integration required it to prune back overdeveloped group memories.¹³

This was a widespread process. Helen Siu et al. described the simultaneous shaping of ethnic narrative and ethnic group in East Asia: “But ethnicity as history cannot be separated from the evidentiary processes by which history is understood; it cannot be more real, more important, or more primary than the manifestations by which it is recognized.”¹⁴ In other words, recognition of a group identity results from a narrative of the group, and its collective acceptance makes the group. Writing in 1982, the historian of Judaism Yosef Yerushalmi put it sharply. Collective memory, he wrote, is a social reality sustained and transmitted “through the conscious efforts and institutions of the group.”¹⁵ That replication is a part of the self-knowledge (or collective memory) that any coherent social group must produce. It is the social process by which this happens that I will illustrate and discuss throughout this book. In his important work on Jewish historiography, Yerushalmi points out that when “we say that a people ‘remembers’ we are really saying that a past has been actively transmitted to the present generation and that this past has been accepted as meaningful.” Forgetting is a break in transmission, gradual or sudden. It occurs when human groups fail to transmit what they know “out of rebellion, indifference, or indolence, or as the result of some disruptive historical catastrophe.”¹⁶

Yerushalmi also considered the place of religious communities in Halbwachs’s frame of thought. In a separate work on the memories imprinted by rival faiths onto the landscape of Palestine, Halbwachs recognized how religious communities could nurture separate, and mutually contradictory, historical memories.¹⁷ Yerushalmi wished to explain why members of the long and erudite rabbinical tradition were so unconcerned about the history of their own time. For them, he argued, the biblical interpretation of history had revealed a pattern that would recur in the future too. In its ensemble, the biblical record seemed capable of illuminating every further historical contingency.¹⁸ In his path-breaking Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, Eviatar Zerubavel also pointed out that “not everything that happens is preserved in our memory, as many past events are actually cast into oblivion. Acknowledgedly historical events still form only that small part that we have come to preserve as public memory.” Nor is the creation of this mnemonic archive a purely random process. Zerubavel shows also that groups consolidate themselves around memories of a common past and that “acquiring a group’s memories and thereby identifying with its collective past is part of the process of acquiring any social identity.”

That transfer of collective memory becomes especially important when the bearers of one social identity supplant those of another. Over a half-century ago, Halbwachs analyzed how “Christian collective memory could annex a part of the Jewish collective memory by appropriating part of the latter’s local remembrance while at the same time transforming its entire perspective of historical space.” Halbwachs was well aware of the role of political authority in the making of the social framework within which legitimate memory, as distinct from an individual dream or fantasy, is shaped.¹⁹ Furthermore, with his focus on the community of memory—a mortal human community—Halbwachs well knew how historical contingency can shape, alter, or extinguish social memory.

We may see this best in Halbwachs’s study of how the vicissitudes of political power changed the sites of memory in Palestine, from pre-Roman times to the twentieth century. He carefully teased out how the returning Crusaders (after their capture of Jerusalem in 1099) began implanting their memories by building shrines and churches that physically embodied their “knowledge” of the major episodes in the life of Jesus Christ. Yet the twelfth-century landscape that they conquered ...

Table of contents

• History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Revisiting Histories in the Post-truth Era
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Translations and Diacritical Marks
• Introduction
• 1. The Construction of Collective Memory: Sites and Processes
• 2. The Many Pasts of the Indian Subcontinent
• 3. Social Structure and Historical Narration in Western India
• 4. History and Memory through the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index