Presenting the Past Anxious History and Ancient Future in Hindutva India

46 "Presenting" the Past

If a comprehensive survey of the globe were to be made, it would be found that

in almost every quarter of it there were settlements of European men, or traces of

the operation of the European mind. The surviving aboriginal peoples in the west-

ern hemisphere are a small, unimportant, and dwindling element in the popula-

tion. ... To the conquest of nature through knowledge the contributions made by

Asiatics have been negligible and by Africans (Egyptians excluded) non-existent.

It is clear who Fisher writes for, and how his generalizations relate to the

"predetermined pattern" spanning the last 2,500 years.^1 Charles Tilly

underscores the connection between history and folk history:

History as an organized discipline shares a number of traits with folk history, the

ways that ordinary people reconstruct the past. In the West, for the most part,

people take history as a set of stories about individuals who act for well-defined

motives with clear consequences.... Folk history rarely concerns superhuman

forces, complex social processes, or ordinary people—except as objects or distant

causes of history, or at the point of contact between the teller's own life and certifi-

ably great events or persons. History written by specialists gains popular appeal

to the extent that it conforms to these standards.^2

Thus history, like politics, becomes everybody's business, and every-

one—elders, ordinary people, politicians, officials, intellectuals, journal-

ists—becomes a historian. When contemporary politics is conducted with

reference to past events, "explanation and understanding" becomes vital.^3

With the advent of electoral politics in the twentieth century, public fig-

ures in India have found it necessary to invoke the past. The politicians

talk to the masses about their past to rally voters, emphasize rivalries and

enmities, and make use of the past to divide/unite and gain. As discussed

before, both Moore and Jeffrey shed fresh light on this politicians-masses

interaction in their respective studies of Sri Lanka and Punjab, and lay

a convincing claim that popular myth plays a significant role in history

writing. Both popular and rhetorical histories interact very closely at this

plane of myth.

A myth is, as Hampden-Turner puts it, "not something which is untrue

but a shared cultural context for communication." It is a way of "teach-

ing unobservable realities by way of observable symbols." Since a myth

is orally transmitted, there will be gaps and distortions; however, a par-

ticular "musical score" conveys the structure despite the missing parts.

Claude Levi-Strauss holds that myths may vary in details while sharing

a common structure or pattern that is identical with the pattern of mind.

According to him, "What man says, language says and what language

says is said by society."^4

For Hans-Georg Gadamer, myth is a process of a "thinking conscious-

ness." A myth encompasses fundamental issues of human existence and

therefore has the capacity to generate new interpretations. Both Levi-