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1 The Construction of Collective Memory

Sites and Processes
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History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000
This chapter is in the book History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000
91 The Construction ofCollective MemorySites and Processesinvoking 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.1If 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 know ­ledge 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.
© 2019, University of Washington Press

91 The Construction ofCollective MemorySites and Processesinvoking 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.1If 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 know ­ledge 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.
© 2019, University of Washington Press

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Preface ix
  4. Acknowledgments xi
  5. A Note on Translations and Diacritical Marks xiii
  6. Introduction 1
  7. 1 The Construction of Collective Memory 9
  8. 2 The Many Pasts of the Indian Subcontinent 50
  9. 3 Social Structure and Historical Narration in Western India 83
  10. 4 History and Memory through the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 118
  11. Conclusion 176
  12. Notes 179
  13. Bibliography 203
  14. Index 225
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9780295746234-005

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Preface ix
  4. Acknowledgments xi
  5. A Note on Translations and Diacritical Marks xiii
  6. Introduction 1
  7. 1 The Construction of Collective Memory 9
  8. 2 The Many Pasts of the Indian Subcontinent 50
  9. 3 Social Structure and Historical Narration in Western India 83
  10. 4 History and Memory through the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 118
  11. Conclusion 176
  12. Notes 179
  13. Bibliography 203
  14. Index 225
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