Language, Memory and Remembering

Explorations in Historical Sociolinguistics

Vaidehi Ramanathan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780815358879
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429772863
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume explores issues of memory, remembering and language in late colonial India. It is the first systematic historical sociolinguistic study of English private and public citizens who lived in and/or worked for India and the Indian cause from the 1920s to the 1940s. While some of the English have lived as common citizens and were committed to India, their voices and contributions have remained on the margins of Indian collective memory. This book offers microhistorical readings of extended language forms generally underexplored in sociolinguistics (such as letters, telegrams, missives, and oral histories) to reorient facets of individual memories, lives, and endeavours against larger officialised understandings of the past.

Using previously unpublished corpus of archival material and interviews with English private citizens from that period, this volume on historical sociolinguistics will be of interest to scholars and researchers of language and linguistics, South Asian studies, post-colonial literary studies, culture studies, and modern history.

1
Reconstructing Social Contexts from Unusual Linguistic Texts

Microhistory and historicity

It goes without saying that language and its relation to contexts are at the heart of any sociolinguistic endeavor. That is what we socio-linguists do: we examine language use – speech or written texts – in terms of the contexts in which they are embedded, and typically these are present, current contexts, the now, so to speak. But with documents produced in the past, the relationship between text and context, becomes complicated because we do not have a full sense of the contexts that produced them. Those contexts have come and gone. As a sociolinguist, then, I am left with reconstructing contexts to make sense of (written) texts. In so doing, I am stretching a long arm into the past to recreate plausible ideologies or political currents that can frame texts. I am ‘connecting the dots,’ so to speak, drawing a line, not necessarily linear, between the past and this present. The act of doing so renders the texts and our reading of them transhistorical, with the texts acquiring the punchy ability to shift our current cognitions and challenging our contemporary orientations.

It is worth pondering, though, how the past can get patterned or plotted by a sociolinguist. Time is both of the past and of the present, so what do old texts of the past say about past and about our present? This point is important to consider because the sociolinguistic researcher is engaged in creating chronoschisms – ruptures in linear, chronological time – as he/she goes back and forth (in time) when recreating bits of the past and then suturing them into our present understandings (Heisse 1997). Plausibility is key here. Creating a believable, plausible context is what the historical sociolinguist is called to do, and it is this (partial) reconstruction of a plausible context against which to understand old documents and voices that I will be engaging in the next few chapters.

Historicity and the recreation of a past

What is ‘reconstruction’? What might a sociolinguist be ‘reconstructing’ when stretching a long arm into the past? What is important to ‘reconstruct’ in a historical sociolinguist exploration? The Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines reconstruction as

1. A “thing that has been rebuilt after being damaged or destroyed;
2. A comparison between the original and the reconstruction;
3. An impression, a model, or re-enactment of a past event formed from the available evidence.”

(author’s emphasis)

Number 3 above seems to come closest given the purposes of this exploration. The underscoring of ‘available’ above is crucial to note, since what counts as ‘evidence’ can often be disputed by historians, given relative degrees of importance associated with the veracity of the ‘evidence.’ For a sociolinguist with a historical bent, veracity matters, but what also matters is the extent to which the ‘evidence’ is language-related and the extent to which it reveals aspects of human communication (either via sound changes over time or via particular written forms, as in the present case; see Langer et al. 2012; Elpass 2012). Also important and necessary to the historical sociolinguistic endeavor are some of the key historical ‘facts’ or assumptions undergirding the sociolinguistic exploration.

But this is where we also run into some thin ground. Neither historian nor sociolinguist can avoid dealing with the problematic nature of historical ‘facts’ and the extent to which current ‘evidence’ amplifies known ‘facts’ (our current default understanding) or sits at odds with them. The question about whether we can ever fully know the linguistic past seems necessarily tied to how we know the past, since all we have of the past are traces and leftovers of a time gone by. So the issue of how we understand the past is important to address head on, and for this it is necessary to tease apart the interwoven relationship between collective and cultural memory and individual remembering.

Collective memory and the past

Assman and Czaplicka (1995) make clear distinctions between the memory we use for everyday communication and collective memory. As they point out, “everyday communication is characterized by a high degree of non-specialization, reciprocity of roles, thematic instability, and disorganization” (p. 125). Typically, it takes place between people who can change roles, with whoever is speaking, arguing, explaining becoming the listener in the next few moments. And we know of all kinds of everyday contexts – water-cooler chats, tidbits in elevators – that regulate this and the high degree of formlessness about them. The bits of stored information that people retrieve to engage in meaningful conversations are both socially mediated and related to groups.

However, once we segue from the area of everyday communication into the area of collective memory – where groups of people recall larger cultural events in similar ways – we have entered into the domain of objectivized culture (Assman and Czaplicka 1995). There is direct connection between individual memories and those that are shared in the group, and it is in this connection that there is a cultural identity. Assman and Czaplicka refer to this as the “concretion of identity” and believe that “a group bases its consciousness of unity and specificity upon this knowledge and derives formative and normative impulses from it, which allows the group to reproduce its identity. In this sense, objectivized culture has the structure of memory” (1995: 128).

Assman and Czaplicka (1995) explain that cultural memory exists in two modes: first, it exists in the mode of the archive, of accumulated texts and images in a variety of domains that were real and actual and have been memorialized and documented. And second, it exists in the mode of actuality, where individuals can draw on this archive to give their own memory and positionings credence and relevance. Constant and frequent engagements between both the repository and individual memory solidify connections between them. It, thus, exists as a body of reusable texts, images, and rituals and whose cultivation serves to maintain a particular self-image. It is from this almost jelly-like and moldable dialectic that determinations such as ‘We are this’ and ‘We are not that’ emerge. Schisms around ‘belonging’ and ‘foreign’ can be partially explained from this space.

But archives and individual memories, while they uphold different and various aspects of the past, are always incomplete. We cannot fully know the past because we are each implicated in the historical process. Also, there is no such thing as having all the ‘facts’ of the past. Perloff (1988) cautions us to be careful about distinguishing ‘events’ from ‘facts’ and says that events are made into ‘facts’ and narrativized into place. This cautionary note seems relevant for us sociolinguists to consider, especially if what we are exploring concerns humans and their language-related engagements in communities. We may have some ‘facts’ about these communities that have come down to us because historians presented them in certain ways. And these ‘facts’ are important because collective identities rest on them. But at another point in our collective development (as nations, tribes, or any other collective unit), we sometimes run into evidence that offer other remembrances, and that nuance our more ‘official’ understandings. But even in this process of addressing other evidence, there are questions to be answered: what are these traces of? How full or partial are they? What kind of cultural and ideological context can we construct for them and out of them?

These concerns are by no means new. Sociolinguists with historical orientations have to pay a lot of attention to all kinds of details, including those relating to cultural/collective memories and individual ones in order to reconstruct plausible accounts of past events. The past does not exist until the researcher has created it, until he/she has zoomed in on particular events and chosen them to be highlighted into ‘facts.’ It is this nugget of understanding, of what the process of determining ‘facts’ entails, that we historical sociolinguists need to speak openly about: tensions in selectivity regarding which bits of evidence to highlight, formal aspects of textual forms that are as necessary to interpret (as content), and the general methodological ‘door’ in to the domain. Microhistory (of the sort associated with the Annales School and the Subaltern Studies Group) seems most suitable for such endeavors and is an orientation I adopt for the current exploration.

Microhistory and historical sociolinguistics

In general terms, a microhistory is an intensive investigation of a relatively well-defined smaller domain of focus, often a single event, or a few people (Le Roy Laudrie 1975; Magnusson and Szijarto 2013). By paying attention to details around particular events or a few people, a microhistory allows an intensive historical study of the subject while offering a very different picture of the past. It draws on materials and evidence to make a very local case to answering some larger historical questions, such as the ones mentioned in the Introduction. Certainly, some of the data with which I am working isn’t typical sociolinguistic data. Indeed, one could well argue that forms such as letters, telegrams, inserts, and oral histories are ‘occluded’ genres; they are textual forms that have remained hidden, a point that research in applied linguistics has made us aware of (Swales 1999, 2004) and that has tended to remain underexplored in historical sociolinguistic research.

I am hoping to underscore a point with this unusual mélange of materials: that the reconstructing of plausible contexts around historic texts sometimes demands attention to data types that we typically dismiss. While the piecing together of much of our collectively remembered past happens via archives and historians – thus leading to very particular interpretations of historical events – paying attention to alternate data types via the microhistory door opens up the possibility of newer conversations and fresher topics. Moving our attention to traces stuck away, forgotten in attics or bound in carefully packaged boxes in libraries, opens up the possibility of a different set of understandings that emerges from the space between individual memories and collective remembering. While historical narratives (the way histories of countries get told, enacted, reproduced, ritualized) tend to be sweeping in their tropes, more micro orientations to remembering – via individual oral histories and letters written by individuals – offer nuanced pictures into time periods that otherwise get glossed over. The interest in oral history (Bourguet et al. 1990), photographic analysis, and alternate documents (such as letters) not just by historians but by journalists and anthropologists lends credence to the idea that creating a set of recollections that run parallel to the official collective understanding is necessary. They are the necessary ‘bottom-up’ voices of the those left silenced or marginalized at a certain time (Chaturvedi 2000; Sharpe 2001; Burke 2001).

In this sense, then, microhistories laminate traditional historiography differently in that they tend to give pride of place to more dominant actors of history by puncturing the sealed borders of official collective understandings. They try to show how the historical actors’ experiences and the meanings that they attributed to them connect to larger and deeper historical tropes. A historical sociolinguist, then, works with the past from below by engaging in a retrospective analysis of materials and data that were previously either unavailable or for ‘necessary’ political reasons left out of collective remembrances. This kind of microinvestigation honors the complexity of relationships of actors to their contexts and times in history, while also laminating our current interpretations of the past differently.

Magnusson and Szijarto (2013) maintain that the objective of microhistory is much more far-reaching than that of a case study in that micro historians always look for answers to large historical questions in small places. They also point out that for most scholars that engage in it do so out of a commitment to agency. For them, the people who lived in the past are not “merely puppets in the hands of great underlying forces of history but they are regarded as active individuals, conscious actors” (p. 5). The fact that microhistory seeks answers to larger historical questions attests to it being on the side of traditional social history. By offering a micro orientation to understanding major political events of the past – via letters or telegrams or oral histories, as in the present case – it opens up the possibility of a “richer synthesis of historical understanding, of a fusion of the history of the everyday people with the subject matter of more traditional types of history” (Sharpe 2001: 33).

Memory is central here. As the chapters will point out, each of the extended language forms reveals microhistories – experiences and memories – be they of people at the time of the photo or letter writing or of our remembering and documenting these years later as we make meaning of them. These traces become a source of validation and documentation, presumably of factual information, life as it ‘really was.’ However, in their static, inert form, stashed away, these forgotten materials are the epitome of non-experience and in that sense are as close to dead as they can be. They capture flashes of frozen memories and can be triggers to former experiences and memories, when we researchers, years later, reach into boxes in basements, blowing off dust, and start to breathe life into them (Steedman 2002). This process of resurrecting them years later, reading them against the ideologies of the times, partially informs the (present) process of creating contexts. As texts, then, they invite us to produce contexts and emerge to breathe only once some kind of plausible context has been constructed.

Political implications of reconstructing contexts in historical sociolinguistics

As much postcolonial scholarship has pointed out (whether in literature, cultural studies, or history), the deliberate assemblage of formerly colonized nations is a space where history writing had to take specific forms (Anderson 2006; Makoni and Kamwangamalu 2000) where, in the aftermath of colonialism, historians had to work to assemble a sense of a country’s identity. This is particularly true in the case of Indian history and nation-building efforts after 1947, when the country became independent and the Raj officially came to an end. Indian historians writing the country’s history at the time needed to do so by valorizing, among other things, the efforts of Indian public figures in the freedom struggle (Chakrabarty 1998, 2002; Chatterjee 1993; Dube 2004; Kaiwar and Mazumdar 2003) to create a very particular kind of ‘Indian-ness.’ This was essential to a collective sense of being an Indian, and as one raised in India, it is central to my identity.

But with the discovery of Charles Andrews’s writing in the Gandhi Ashram, I have found myself curious not just about him but other English citizens who were committed to India. Indeed, when I was looking for documents about Andrews in the Bodleian Library, I discovered several letters written to him by Edward Thompson, and Leopold Amery. Also in the box were letters written to him by Rabindranath Tagore (see Appendix). While I had myself not heard of either Thompson or Amery, I realized very quickly that they were writing out a deep sense of engagement and commitment to the Indian cause of Independence. What was even more interesting to me was that their emergence in my consciousness happened via very particular textual forms that I had hitherto not bothered to pay attention to. I also realized at this time that there were other alternate genres I needed to explore, and that via them, I could see glimmers of pictures that didn’t receive adequate amplification. They included oral histories and photographs of English citizens who were born and raised in India, and had to leave for the UK (a place completely unfamiliar to them, and for whom India is still ‘home’). They also included experimenting with metafiction, a genre typically relegated to creative writing, ‘but one that I explore here in my efforts to reconstruct a sense of the ‘historical’ around particular archived documents’. Exploring these documents from a historical and sociolinguistic point of view 71 years after Indian Independence makes me realize at least two important points. First, that I am now temporally placed in a generation that can now ask these questions without a sense of threat to my Indian identity (I am genuinely curious about finding out more about English citizens for whom India or the Indian cause mattered). And second, that turning our attention to occluded textual forms permits us to nuance our collective understanding of the past.

This exploration has implications for issues of silence and silencing as well. Silence, after all, is the flip side of sounds/language. The act of reconstructing plausible contexts around formerly dismissed historical texts is the act of de-silencing, of bringing into language and the present what has been shelved and put away. From a traditional sociolinguistic point of view, these metaphysical notions of (de)silencing may at first glance strike one as being unrelated to silences in the world of action. The ‘practical’ world – where engagements with people, actions, experiences, data count – underscore a wrestling with language-related issues that is more ‘pragmatic,’ more ‘outcome oriented,’ with tangible ‘consequences’ of interactions being measures of ‘success.’ But research in pragmatics (Jaworski 1992; Kasper and Rose 2002) alerts us to the consequentiality of silences and pauses in all manner of interactions, and while the world of action is often seen as incommensurable with the world of contemplation, it needn’t necessarily be so. There is much about the metaphysical aspects of silence and silencing that is relevant to any historical exploration of a sociolinguistic project, and the present endeavor seeks to openly acknowledge its positioning in the general de-silencing debates in studies about our pasts.

Layout of chapters

Because this is a volume that makes a case for including extended written language forms in historical sociolinguistics, I will begin each chapter with a discussion about the genre in question before going into discussing the contents of that form and their implications for historiography. With this in mind, Chapter 2 begins by first addressing letters and telegrams as textual forms. While scholarship on letter writing has been extensively addressed in literary research circles (Bannet 2005; MacArthur 1990), the value of either their extended textual form or insights they may reveal for sociohistorical analysis have tended to remain underexplored. The letters singled out for exploration in this chapter are between Charles Andrews, Edward Thompson, and Leopold Amery, although my small archive of materials includes others as well (see Appendix). The letters were exchanged at a time and across vast geographic spaces when immediate replies were not a realistic expectation. In contrast, telegrams, also explored here, were only just starting to appear around this time and constituted a form that was severely condensed and that did have the possibility of immediate replies encoded in them.

Chapter 3 explores the lives of English private citizens as they come through oral microhistories and photographs. Among other things, the chapter deliberates on oral life histories as a form and the role that photographs play in laminating that form. It also explores questions such as: how do photographs aid memory? What moments of our lives are we conferring importance on, and how do these mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: memory, remembering, and genres: reconstructing ‘historicity’
• 1 Reconstructing social contexts from unusual linguistic texts: microhistory and historicity
• 2 Epistles and telegrams: locating English public citizens
• 3 Oral histories and photographs: locating English private citizens
• 4 Experimenting with metafiction: the case of Charles Andrews and the reconstruction of a time and person
• 5 Reconstructing ‘historicity’: lessons for the historical sociolinguist
• Appendix: correspondence between Andrews and Tagore
• References
• Index