Presenting the Past Anxious History and Ancient Future in Hindutva India

20 "Presenting" the Past

Quoting Durkheim and Mauss, Bruce Lincoln posits that "society is
constructed from nothing so much as from sentiments," and

these sentiments—above all those of internal affinity (affection, loyalty, mutual

attachment, and solidarity) and external estrangement (detachment, alienation,

and hostility)—constitute the bonds and borders that we reify as society. ... it is

precisely through the repeated evocation of such sentiments via the invocation of

select moments from the past that social identities are continually (re-)established

and social formations (re-)constructed. Thus, it is not just because one is Sienese

that one feels pride on hearing the story of Montaperti; rather, when one feels

pride in this story, in that very moment one (re-)becomes Sienese, that is, a person

who feels affinity for those others who also take pride in Montaperti and estrange-

ment from those who do not. (italics in original)^15

History writing/telling/remembering, then, is nothing but a rereading of

the past, and we look into the past with the hope of its being useful now

for our present purposes. Thus history, identity construction, and narra-

tivization form an integrated whole. As Albert Wendt puts it: "A society is

what it remembers; we are what we remember. Like individuals, societies

can and do reorder their memories It is also possible for our histories to

be erased almost totally and replaced by other histories. Our history, since

we swung off the trees and walked on two legs, is full of such erasures and

replacements."^16

To "erase" and "replace" is to narrate. According to Shapiro, real events

do not exist without narratives. He quotes Benedict Anderson's point that

the "French Revolution" emerged only when print media began to place

meaning-creating boundaries around the flux of certain activities in the

late eighteenth century. Shapiro also points out that the event, "which con-

tinually alters with shifts in the textual practices through which the event

is constituted," underwent rapid changes during the recent bicentennial

year of the French Revolution. The French particularly "renegotiated the

past to make it more compatible with the dominant self-interpretations

with which they now live." He further establishes that the recent profes-

sional and media attention in the United States tries to construct a differ-

ent "Vietnam War" than the one produced by the official discourse of the

Johnson administration and the subsequent official and popular culture

narratives. Shapiro quotes Jean-Francois Lyotard's position to support his

argument:

We habitually pose the following sequence: there is the fact, then the account of

the witness, that is to say a narrative activity transforming the fact into a narra-

tive.... This position on the problem of history poses a theatrical model: out-

side, is the fact, external to the theatrical space; on stage the dramatic narrative

unfolds; hidden in the wings ... is the director, the narrator with all his machinery,

the fabbrica of narration. The historian is supposed to undo all the machinery and