A Lover's Quarrel with the Past
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A Lover's Quarrel with the Past

Romance, Representation, Reading

Ranjan Ghosh

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eBook - ePub

A Lover's Quarrel with the Past

Romance, Representation, Reading

Ranjan Ghosh

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About This Book

Although not a professional historian, the author raises several issues pertinent to the state of history today. Qualifying the 'non-historian' as an 'able' interventionist in historical studies, the author explores the relationship between history and theory within the current epistemological configurations and refigurations. He asks how history transcends the obsessive 'linguistic' turn, which has been hegemonizing literary/discourse analysis, and focuses greater attention on historical experience and where history stands in relation to our understanding of ethics, religion and the current state of global politics that underlines the manipulation and abuse of history.

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Year
2012
ISBN
9780857454850

CHAPTER 1

Romancing the Past

Presence and Intangibilities of History

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Soleo enim et in aliena castra transire, non tamquam transfuga, sed tamquam explorator. I am in the habit of crossing over even into alien camps not as a deserter but as an explorer.1
And when you and I talk about history, we don’t mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.2
To be born is not to have been born, and to have been born. It is the same with all verbs: to think is not yet to have thought, and already to have thought. Thus ‘to be born’ is the verb of all verbs: the ‘in the midst of taking place’ that has neither beginning nor end. The verb without a presence of coming to presence.3
Romancing history is a projection of sympathy and indulgence into a past age; history in its invocation of the past is a ‘museum of held reverberations’4; this can lead to excesses, transgressions, instabilities summoning up a delicate consortment of imbalances between the past and the present. It is a poeticisation of the past, a kind of sin that ‘imbalances’ generate, a sin that ‘imagination’ promotes, a sin that spurts a creative gush. Ann Rigney, in her delight of a book Imperfect Histories, argues that the ‘very possibility of historical knowledge implies the possibility of ignorance’. She writes:
Every historical work thus generates its own “residue” or what Arlette Farge, in an evocative turn of phrase, has called ‘l’échappée,’ that which has escaped. The flip side of historical knowledge is ignorance about topics not treated or the historiographical paths not taken. It is in this sense that I understand Norman Hampson’s admission that ‘one might almost go so far as to say that all historical explanations are confessions of ignorance’. Or, as Michelle Perrot wrote with respect to the history of private life: ‘light produces darkness. The unsaid, the unknown, the unknowable . . . increase apace with the knowledge that digs vast chasms . . . beneath our feet’. In contrast to fictions, therefore, all historical works (again including historical novels) have a ramifying hors-texte made up of all those phenomena that have escaped the representation. If historical inquiry is premised on the real existence of an object of knowledge beyond the persons doing the inquiring, it also springs from the sense that existing representations are incomplete and that there is more to be known and said on the matter.5
Historians meet the pleasures of ignorance in a contemplative brooding, reflecting on a past that makes ignorance an experience and ‘lost knowledge’ a provocation to wrestle with. The historian’s lack of understanding does not lead him to sit sluggishly shame-faced, giving up the game with a foreclosed notion of an inevitable defeat; instead, it makes him try his intelligence with greater enthusiasm and power to make deeper and varied sense of the past. What stands registered is a ‘historical power’ out of an ignorance that frustrates to inspire, that defeats without dousing a cry for another fight to knowledge. This is the agony of history, a ritual emerging from description of events as contrasted with discourse, an act of silence and retrieval. It is an acknowledgement of a ‘powerful feeling that history is simultaneously there and not there, real and illusory – a ghost forever trailing behind, which vanishes when we turn around’.6 History does not become a mere investigation but is also a ‘thinking’, a specificity built with the mortars of the past combining a ‘performative’ bedrocked in imagination and intangibles. The past is both the ‘other’ and a self that sees the present as its other, at once as reification and as slithery, transmutative everyday.
Jean-Luc Nancy writes that ‘the characteristic of representational thought is to represent, for itself, both itself and its outside, the outside of its limit. To cut out a form upon the fundament, and to cut out a form of the fundament. Thereafter, nothing more can come, nothing more can come forth, or be born from any fundament’.7 In our ‘formations’ of history, the representable, the irrepresentable and the unrepresentable work within a tension of meaning and an anxiety of sense – not simply in understanding ‘intentionality condition’, ‘recognition condition’ and principle of ‘aboutness’.8 Moving beyond the ‘suspension of history’ is moving with the intangibilities of history. It inaugurates and then terminates itself to reinaugurate a pace, a passage, suturing a coming forth or ‘presencing’ of sense that distinguishes meaning in a form that is not merely cut of the fundament. There is the ‘ghost of Hamlet’s father’ in historical representation – the ghost being a ‘problematic phenomenon, less substantial than flesh and blood, but much more powerful’. Even when it is invisible, it ‘creates a queasy unease in the land’.9 It gives rise to what Eelco Runia would argue as mastering of the historian by the past when all efforts have been made to master the past. The unpredictability of the ghost’s emergence, its protean form and existence in a surplus makes for ‘a luminosity in which the past comes to our assistance and supplies our work with the life we ourselves couldn’t provide. You may call it “inspiration”, an “Aha-Erlebnis”, or just plain “insight”, but the point is that it is a kind of gift from regions whose existence we normally do not recognize’.10 But presence is in the absence and is not a kind of taxonomic opposite of absence. Absence, like Sartre’s négatités enables presence, making it move out of a simple binarism of being and non-being and investing it in a relational context involving a heterogeneity of values and philosophies. The inherent activism and intentionality in absence surface as presence that, in its ‘intense quietness’, then takes an originary position informing ‘different senses’ into our orders of understanding and complexities of discursive manifestation. Absence becomes presence and, hence, a determinant in the formation of discourses, in constituting forms of subjectivity. Such formations are not held by a rule, unchangingly choreographed; most often in a flux and motile, the changes are understood both in its abstract and concrete expressions and in a dialectical fecundity that problematises borders separating myth and history. Presence is not always a surfacing of the repressed; rather, it lubricates out of the persistent ‘translogical’ quarrel with the past, out of a negation of efforts that threaten to lobotomise the past and, also, grows out of a negativity and apprehendability in historical representation and description. Presence leaves history on trial, motivating it as a process that never nihilates the past. Presence influences even in absence; it is a force and a power that absence inscribes among the existent and the registered. Runia argues, ‘Presence is not the result of metaphorically stuffing up absences with everything you can lay your hands on. It can at best be kindled by metonymically presenting absences’.11
Presence is a state of pre-narration; it is also implicated in post-narration. It is caught in the interstices of historical narration; it is an active resident in a prison-house of historical representation. It challenges and questions the limits of representation in a variety of discourses. All forms of representation bear the promise of a presence mothered by an absence. This absence can be conscious when the subject chooses to put something at the other end of the line or, without an alarm to the subject the absence can simmer unwarily in the backyard and then ambush with a meaning under circumstances where factors required to judge its legitimacy are too feeble to question it. Presence can be positive when, for instance, parliamentarians in arguing on the floor of the House keep the ‘absent’ electorate in mind. It can be perilous when narratives of ethnic or communal glorification are mismapped and malappropriated to aggrandise the particular needs of a community at the exclusion of the ‘other’. Ideas from the past that can never be pinned down to strict objectivity and incidents from the past that are more a part of popular consciousness and products of our cultural inheritance than possessions attested to by archaeologists become naturalised residents of our daily existence. The past becomes immovable; it affects and influences the way we think of our present; it loses its pastness and chimes with the breath of our everyday existence. This, thus, rescribes our everyday discourse with the affect and pull of ‘presence’.
Presence succeeds in introducing a tension in the way we perceive the limits of representability. The relationship that presence is seen to have with the past is problematised by the way we define the past in relation to the present. When the past is recorded and grounded in facts and has the sanction of historians and archaeologists, the ambiguities about our ways of representation are sparse. But since not all past is recorded history, the unrepresentability of the past encourages certain experiences and formations that a proper historian cannot be comfortable with. The language of representation changes as a historian is forced to enter the zone of speculative inferences; stepping across the line of certainty that scientific methodologies can provide, representation is often buttressed by imagination and the sublimity in historical experience is allowed to peek over its shoulder. To an extent, presence determines a historian’s language, his choice of subjects, what he wants to represent and what he cannot but leave unrepresented; on some occasions it has the misfortune of being the enemy of historical representation, but on other occasions it is the strength and support in our understanding of things that the rationality and reason traditionally expected of history cannot always explain. Do historical representations become typically more ‘present’ than what they represent? Where does this ‘presence’ come from if the represented, if reality itself, does not endow it with its credentials? Could there be anything that is more ‘real’ and more present than even reality itself? And, if so, what, then, is this ‘anything’ and where should we locate it?’12 Presence is the ‘effectual’ angel who can entice and also be the victim of its own enticement, for when historians fail to clip her wings, the pseudo-nonhistorians outrage her by manipulating her uniqueness to serve their own partisan ends. In fact, Hindu history is one such domain that teases us to think out the vicissitudes of presence’s angelic flighty presence.
Presence conceived as the surfacing of the absent or of what is perceived to be absent or of what has existed without stirring the consciousness has influenced our understanding of Hindu history in many ways. Presence is complicit in the understanding of Hindu history and the unfolding ramifications of the contemporary essentialist and sectarian Hindu attitude towards the ‘other’. How can we render a different dimension to the concept of the ‘presence’ in relation to the shifts and turns of communal history? To what extent can it be appropriated to argue the current crisis in Hindu-Muslim relationships in India? How does ‘presence’ render distinctness to the Indian concept of history and help explicate some areas in our understanding of religion, tradition and historiography? What has presence managed to convey when meaning under the Western principles of historical understanding have failed to comprehend certain aspects of what Hindus understand and have argued as itihasa?

An Indian Approach to Itihasa

The charge, framed within a Western historiographical model, that Hindus lack a sense of history is both contentious and misleading. Narratives of the past in South Asia have too often been dismissed as ‘myth’ simply because they did not conform to certain historiographic standards. V.S. Naipaul leaps forward to note this alleged area of darkness: ‘Indian interpretations of their history are almost as painful as the history itself; and it is especially painful to see the earlier squalour being repeated today . . . people with a sense of history might have ordered matters differently . . . this is precisely the saddening element in Indian history; this absence of growth and development. It is a history whose only history is that life goes on. There is only a series of beginnings, no final creation’.13 Although this chapter does not intend to run a counterdiscourse against these allegations of achronicity and evinces no desire to reframe the categories of Indian historiography within the prescriptions and paradigms of the Western/Hegelian model of world history, it tries to draw attention to the ways in which history has been perceived by the Hindus, the frames and processes in which history has been practised and understood. Rabindranath Tagore summarily dismisses as ‘superstition’ all efforts that try to see history as being tied to the dictates of world history; he believes that history cannot be practised in the same way in every nation. One hears despairing sighs when inroads into archives fail to bless historians with sufficient resources to write about India; they would quip, ‘How can we find history here when there is no politics?’ Tagore wisely notes, ‘When one tries to search for brinjals in the rice field he is destined to meet with frustration and this disappointment makes him conclude that rice is not an agricultural crop’.14 If Hindus are endowed with a sense of history, what, then, is the nature of their historical sense-generation? How has the Hindu way of doing history provoked and made possible the emanation of ‘presence’? How has this distinctness allowed presence to run its own course and influence the ways in which Indians have staked out their tryst with history, their ‘quarrel’ with the past?
An understanding of the distinct Indian approach to itihasa and historiography will perhaps gives us a moderate clue as to the easy capitulation of most Hindus to the mythic and religious ...

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