Book review: Sumit Guha's History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000

By Dilip -

'Our times are testing the truth of Orwell's bitter aphorism "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past" ': From Guha's preface to his new book..    

Historians always work in evolving political contexts that influence their knowledge and narratives. This cultural reality provides a framework for Sumit Guha’s imaginative analysis of how the collective memories that shape human societies are contingent and fragile because they are embedded within the changing institutional systems of social and political life. In History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000, Guha analyzes the processes of remembering and forget- ting in South Asian cultures, but similar sociocultural patterns have also appeared in almost every other human society.

Reviewed by Lloyd Kramer

Historical knowledge serves numerous public needs, including the need for governments and social elites to justify their power and the need for cultural communities to sustain shared collective identities. Historians therefore have an essential public role for which they have often been supported in schools, religious orders, government libraries, and universities, which Guha describes as the “cloistered” institutions that produce and teach historical knowledge (4). This link to institutions, however, makes historical knowledge vulnerable to changing political regimes and to popular upheavals in the social world that always surrounds the cloisters in which experts construct their historical narratives....

Although he provincializes European claims for unique historiographical traditions and methods, he also defends the Rankean belief in the documentary foundation of fact-based historical knowledge. Guha thus views the commitment to evidence-based knowledge as an essential cultural value that should never be dismissed as simply a Eurocentric ideology. Documentary evidence, as he correctly insists, provides valid criteria for historical truth in South Asia and in every other society that seeks to establish reliable knowledge about its own past. This commitment to evidence-based historical knowledge, however, leads Guha to an unexpected critique of historians who draw radical relativist implications from the argument that narrative choices shape the construction of all historical knowledge....

It is certainly true that all narratives are constructed, but Guha skillfully shows (and almost all historians would agree) that some narratives are far more truthful than others because the best historical accounts are based on documentary evidence and other verifiable sources. Guha’s analysis of South Asian historians thus uses evidence-based criteria to explain why some constructed narratives are more valid than others. His concluding lament about a misguided academic acceptance of the postmodern emphasis on the shaping power of narratives seems to be refuted by the critical assessments of different textual constructions in his own impressive book.

My questions about the impact of changing technologies and the ongoing evaluation of truth claims in historical narratives suggest some of the key issues that Guha’s book encourages readers to continue exploring in our “post-truth” historical era. Although he develops an insightful account of the ways in which historical knowledge evolved in specific South Asian cultures, Guha also shows how this long-developing cultural history challenges traditional narratives about European exceptionalism, confirms the influence of cross-cultural exchanges, demonstrates the complex hybridity of colonial and postcolonial ideologies, and exemplifies the continual intersection of historical knowledge and public conflicts. Guha’s emphasis on the contingency of historical knowledge and the vulnerability of experts also reminds professional historians that sociopolitical forces affect the narratives they write as well as the economic resources that support their privileged positions. Historians thus remain vulnerable to the revolutionary upheavals they like to study from the safety of their cloistered positions.

Perhaps the current vulnerability of professional historians results partly from a gradual twentieth-century scholarly withdrawal from intellectual engagements with public life and public history. Given the pressing need for historical narratives in public life and in the cultural defense of collective identities, there will always be (nonexpert) groups who want to fill the public historical vacuum that exists when historians argue only among themselves. The historians’ long-term retreat to university cloisters has become increasingly problematic amid the recent populist upheavals around the world, but these unsettling events may now be forcing historians to become more aware of their connections to the public sphere. This awareness could grow in all national cultures as university-based historians struggle to maintain student enrollments and financial resources - and as activist groups constantly develop self-supporting historical narratives in the popular media that flourish outside academic cloisters.

Sumit Guha’s well-argued, well-researched account of collective memory in the longue durée of South Asian history thus helps historians understand the enduring connections between historical knowledge and the struggle for power in public cultures. Cloistered historical experts who find themselves increasingly besieged by twenty-first-century culture wars and polarizing political conflicts might turn to Guha’s narrative for transcultural perspectives on their current challenges. They may also draw on his perceptive analysis of South Asian historical narratives to understand more clearly why they must engage with public cultures beyond their cloisters and defend the evidence-based historical knowledge that others will denounce, distort, or ignore.

https://www.resenhacritica.com.br/tag/history-and-collective-memory-in-south-asia-1200-2000-t/

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