Memory, History and Conflict
Julian Barnes, in his Booker Prize winning novel from 2011, The Sense of an Ending, makes an intellectual enquiry into human memory and its capacity to lead one to the truth. Through his stunning musings in the book, he establishes that memories and impressions, since they are based on selective remembrance, and because they fade and / or get coloured with time, are imperfect and unreliable. They do not serve a purpose higher than invoking nostalgia and helping build a coherent narrative – a seamless, logical story of one’s life. Also, unaware of how one is wired, one keeps retaining images congruent to the logic of one’s past, resulting in an explanation of events that may comfort, but in essence, is an incomplete picture, a fragment of the truth. Such partial blindness may be devastating to an individual when one is faced with evidence contrasting one’s beliefs. To quote a common example, many people spend their lives denying mental abuse by their parents, partners, or superiors at work. They function, clinging to any meaning that they could comfortably align to such denial. But at times, existing within the margin becomes impossible. It is not unnatural for abusers to cross lines. The vulnerable are then exposed to the unavoidable. In most cases, people let shock get the better of them.
Memory, at a macro level, has a deeper significance. Memory is the ink with which history is penned. To put it differently, what most people remember (or choose to remember or are made to remember) becomes history. When it is on this imperfection that the glory of one community and the shame of another are built, conflict is inevitable.
Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali says in his poem, Farewell: “My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.” People are diverse. They remember differently. In their naivety, most recall events and visuals that suit their narrative and portray their communities in a better light. At the same time, they tend to overlook other peoples’ faculties of remembering, inferring and creating. This lacuna in understanding keeps feeding chances to the political opportunists who capitalise the insecurities and mistrust, reiterating the glories of a particular community, singing nationalism or freedom, and demonising other people(s), to rise to power. THIS is the seed to all conflicts across the globe.
If we talk about India, we have been witnessing the cycle since centuries. Independence did not rid us of our vulnerability. The Partition and subsequent wars have been proofs of the same. And where do we stand today? How did we arrive at this new lexicon where ‘worship’, ‘peace’ and ‘war’, all have assumed a synonymy? People on both sides, through their batons and candlesticks, are preaching ideas that are destructive in essence and stem from the handicap of human memory.
When a ‘nationalist’ equates a gunshot to a temple bell and a peace-monger denies the histories in a patriot’s chest, aren’t the both of them strengthening the old system, weaving anew the cycle that consumes humanity at last?
A pseudo - nationalist garners strength from seeing clones and feels empowered when the surface is whitewashed. A resounding gunshot would drown the tintinnabulation of temple bells but he / she seldom notices the same, possessed by fervour – looking love and sounding hate!
Moreover, advocating peace is neither living in denial of history nor perceiving the idea as being synonymous with ‘history is overrated’. History, if you pursue it with passion, will lead you to a million stories that are alike but differ in their colours. As you trace patterns, and give your sweat and blood to the pursuit of truth, you will see that ‘change’ is bound to happen – because diversity is. As you walk through the endless lists of winners and losers, you will see that there is nothing to detest in the volatility of our situation, our lack of control over our condition. On the contrary, this driver of change is something that renders us all equal despite our differing beliefs and the labels we wear on our sleeves. Our vulnerability is kryptonite to absolute power and iron fists.
The pursuit of history and the road to truth do not lead us to any one fact, any certainty other than the understanding that we can only see a piece of the sky at one time – that we are not designed to behold and grasp an infinity. The whole truth, the big picture is unknowable. We, who assign shapes to constellations, are in fact, caught in an orbit tethered to Time.