48 "Presenting" the Past
their knowledge about and attitudes toward life." Geertz argues that every
form of human behavior involves thought, and hence it can be subjected
to semiotic analysis.^9
Such a semiotic analysis with Vattimo's emphasis on narrative structure
will lead us to concur with Iqbal Ansari that the (religion-tainted) commu-
nal perceptions of history have got entrenched in the collective psyche of
Indians as myths and symbols and that this "mythic-psychic-folklorish"
operant of the Indian mind transforms the ordinary events and incidents
in the social and cultural life affecting Hindu-Muslim relations in hue and
shape. This operant of the average Indian mind makes it possible for some
politicians and bigoted religious leaders to manipulate them.^10
India, as a matter of fact, is a "context-sensitive society," and people
perceive "much of their behavior against a background of social, religious,
and historicolegendary contexts." The texts here are deliberately framed
by authors—"that is, placed within contexts that provide the listener/
reader with clues for interpreting its message." This kind of metacommu-
nicative strategies employed in cultural performances, which include folk
dances and dramas, recitation of folktales by professional bards, telling of
parables and jokes in everyday situations, religious sermons, construction
of street speech, and so forth, "have an ability to transform and enhance
life, often by reference to impersonal values and experiences."^11
After all, as scholars agree, historical interpretation is a product of con-
temporary ideology, which encourages the adoption of certain attitudes
and theories about the past. Contemporary ideologies, the historian's
predilections, his choice of events, the nature of his choice, his subjectiv-
ity, and his narrativity are all mutually interconnected variables that give
rise to the contemporary myth, often called the "national history." When
a mythological story itself becomes the focal point of this contemporary
myth, we witness an inverted project of history writing. The Ramayana, a
popular Indian epic that employs metanarrative strategies, is an impor-
tant text to delineate this connection between the popular mythological
and contemporary Hindutva version of Indian national history.
Jawaharlal Nehru, a rather important person in the making of the post-
colonial India, claims that he "saw the moving drama of the Indian people
in the present, and could often trace the threads which bound their lives
to the past." He explains the past:
Everywhere I found a cultural background which had exerted a powerful influ-
ence on their lives. This background was a mixture of popular philosophy, tradi-
tion, history, myth, and legend, and it was not possible to draw a line between any
of these. Even the entirely uneducated and illiterate shared this background. The
old epics of India, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and other books, in popular
translations and paraphrases, were widely known among the masses, and every
incident and story and moral in them was engraved on the popular mind and gave
a richness and content to it.^12