The power of storytelling

By Neera Chandhoke

THE EDUCATIONAL apparatus of the Indian state has done it again: left-leaning historians have been dropped from the project of writing the history of the Indian nation-state, this time by the NCERT. If the Indian Council of Historical Research had waged a veritable vendetta against Professors Sumit Sarkar and K. N. Panikkar, and the late Parthasarthi Gupta, now it is Professors Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma, Satish Chandra, and Bipan Chandra who are sought to be banished from the space of writing history for students. One would have thought that the Ministry would have had more important matters on its hands, that of imparting literacy to that half of the population that remains non- literate, in order to gain at least some access to higher rankings in the Social Development Index. One would have expected that the officials of the NCERT should concentrate on providing blackboards, books, teachers, and school buildings to all the children who are repeatedly condemned to living out their lives on the margins of society. The record of the Indian state in keeping half of its population illiterate is scandalous and shameful. The holders of power should be doing something about this, particularly at a time when India is eagerly looking to the world for encomiums. But no, the holders of power in the Ministry of Human Resources have to go and pour all their energies into deciding on who should be writing history text and reference books and who should not. Present power is been used to rewrite the past.

The only reason why people want to be masters of the present, observes Milan Kundera, is that they want to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies are rewritten. Whereas the future, suggests Kundera, may be an apathetic void of no interest to anyone, the past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. Kundera's insightful comment makes sense when we realise that a sense of the past is absolutely crucial for understanding where we are at the present, and where we may be going to in the foreseeable future. A society without a past, an individual without memory is an aberration, amnesia - howsoever comfortable it may prove for many - is after all viewed as a pathological condition. We know of no society that does not possess collective memory; no society that does not flaunt its archives of the past in the form of history text books, mythologies, festivals, commemorative occasions, and all the panoply that goes into the making of socially constructed remembrance.

But where we have come from is not an easy question to answer, history after all is plural with often two events occurring at the same moment in time. Whereas for some people August 1947 is the year of independence, for others the same month is the year of the partition of India. Some of us may remember with some pride a victory over colonialism, others may recollect with sadness that it was a victory that came to us with bloodied feet and torn hands. ``Yeh who subah to nahi'' wrote Faiz mournfully, even as other poets celebrated the onset of independence.

And that is the nature of the past: multiple, complex, overlapping, and conflictual at the same time. When we remember the past we remember untidily, with memory laid upon memory and memory juxtaposed to memory. It is only when the past is narrativised that it becomes accessible to us. We simply come to know of the past through narratives of the past. Therefore, as Ben Okri tells us in `The Joys of Storytelling', storytellers become the repositories of a people's wisdom and follies, the living memory of a people. Even as the storytellers go down deep into the ``seeds of time, into the unconscious, into the unchartered fears'', they have to see clearly and make things more real to us than our most ordinary or our most frightening experiences do.

Given our primordial desire to know where we have come from it is not surprising that storytellers and historians - and that there is a great difference between them is not quite clear in this moment of postmodernity - wield great power over societies. For when someone tells us a story, he or she does not only make a laundry list of events, he or she organises these events, makes causal connections between them, orders them, and thereby interprets them. As a complex exercise in connection and interpretation, the narrative - never wholly real but neither wholly imagined - will always be more than a sum of events the narrator thinks are significant for the human condition. Certainly, narratives perform what Aristotle calls a `mimetic function' since their referral will be historical. But there is more, for by bringing together events, agents, purposes, causes and consequences, and by integrating them into a complete and intelligible story, narratives create new patterns. Historical narratives inescapably possess a cognitive dimension as they open up entire fields of comprehension.

Expectedly storytellers - whether they may be professional historians, novelists, dramatists, playwrights, painters and musicians, or neighbourhood natak mandalis that stage the epic Ramayana every October - who recount tales about our origins and who order our past, influence us in two ways. First, narratives proclaim a closure onto memory itself, which otherwise is unstable. Second, narratives are simply in the business of privileging one meaning over another.

Therefore, we realise that narrative is a supremely ideological form. It matters what is narrated, how it is narrated, it matters what it is narrated for, and it matters what is not narrated. The way a story is told, what is left out and what is included, what is focussed on and what is abjured, which voice is privileged, and which voice is blackballed, will axiomatically depend on the personal commitments of the narrator, his or her ideological commitments and values. That is why the past is never written once and for all and then written off, it is constantly being repainted, its dullness glossed over, and its contours reshaped in accordance with the ideological predisposition of the narrator.

The difference between historical narratives and the power they wield is thus the difference between world views and the normative projects of these world views. But then we find good narratives and bad narratives. How do we distinguish between them? First, a good historical narrative is one that is accepted by the peer group. This may appear a vanity of academics, but getting acclaim from a peer group is not easy, ridden as academia is with often trivial jealousies and rivalries over interpretation and ideology. Of course, some books are catapulted into fame for no reason whatsoever, but then it is only a good historical narrative that endures over time. And to endure, a historical narrative must present not only a rigorous but a persuasive rendering of why things happened the way they did. Whatever be the historical contingency, there are some books that will stand the test of time - Gibbon's rise and fall of the Roman Empire is one example.

More importantly, historical narratives can be distinguished by their normative commitments. Undeniably an interpretation of the past is dictated by present concerns. But what are these concerns? That of building a society where people belonging to diverse persuasions can live together in some peace and dignity? Or that of building a society where nothing but hate and animosity constructs subjects of action? Which project is better? This will depend on which one of these narratives address the concern of the ordinary man and woman with care and concerns? Which narrative is normatively desirable? That which critiques the past and thereby the present from the vantage point of normative concerns - tolerance, pluralism, secularism, justice, democracy, freedom and equality? Or that which presents the past uncritically in glorious terms in order to legitimise the present incumbents of power? There is a particularly nasty term for the latter kind of history - it is called court history. Court bards now exercise power along with others such as teachers of astrology in academia.

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