Ramraksha: Ram-ifying the Society and Modi-fying the State 153everyone participates in this production through public representations
and through private (and collective) memory. The agencies that constitute
and control the public historical sphere may be called "the historical appa-
ratus," and their products become "the field of public representations of
history." The "dominant memory" points to the power and pervasiveness
of specific historical representations, their connections with dominant
institutions, and the part they play in winning consent and building alli-
ances in the process of formal politics. The private memory denotes the
knowledge of past produced in the course of everyday life that may be
recorded in intimate cultural forms such as letters, diaries, and so forth.^23
Memory as such directs our attention to "the past-present relation," and
hence all political activity is a process of historical argument and definition
and all political programs involve some construction of the past as well as
the future. Thus the relation between history and politics is an internal
one, that is, about the politics of history and the historical dimensions of
politics.^24 Michael Bommes and Patrick Wright posit, "Memory has a tex-
ture which is both social and historic: it exists in the world rather than in
people's heads, finding its basis in conversations, cultural forms, personal
relations, the structure and appearance of places and, most fundamentally
for this argument, in relation to ideologies which work to establish a con-
sensus view of both the past and the forms of personal experience which
are significant and memorable."^25 In a set of oral traditions such as India's,
there are an infinite variety of situations that prompt people to generate
messages that either convey news or interpret existing situations. The lat-
ter class of messages that deal with "the expression of experience" include
personal reminiscences, etiological commentaries (on existing objects),
traditions (explanatory glosses), and linguistic (folk etymology) and liter-
ary (oral art) expressions. They represent a stage in the elaboration of his-
torical consciousness and are among the major wellsprings of culture.^26
The filmic constructions of history in India, for example, reproduce
the Indian historiographical tradition that does not separate history from
myth, legend, and drama. So impersonation in the Bombay film world
takes the culturally privileged form of syncretism in which history is
an amalgam of mythical tales, legends, and folk knowledge rather than
the "truth" of past events and personages. After all, itihasa—the nearest
equivalent term for "history" in Sanskrit, meaning "thus it was" or "so it
has been"—constitutes a genre of composition like kavya (poetry) or natya
(drama). It is not considered to be a presentation of facts as such but refers
to legend, history, and accounts of past events. The Indian historical tradi-
tion grew out of, among many other things, the literary forms that pre-
vailed during the Vedic period, such as gathas (songs), narasamsi (eulogies
of heroes), akhyana (dramatic narratives), and pur ana (ancient lore). Today,
mythology, genealogy, and historical narrative are considered to be the
three major constituents of Indian historical tradition.^27