Learning to forget

By Dipankar Gupta

IT IS said about the Bourbon Kings that they forgot nothing and they learnt nothing. To be able to learn something new it is important to forget the old. A cluttered mind is incapable of moving ahead, of being nimble and fleet-footed. This is why memories, aided by written histories, have, in balance, largely helped the thick-headed revivalist and not the forward-looking modernist. A modernist would rather forget and move on, but a sectarian can only remember. Those who see the golden age in the past, or those whose identities are defined by a historic tragedy, are the ones who most doggedly refuse to forget. For them only the past has significance for the present is a lie. The future can be meaningful only if the past can be revisited, or else, what is the use of tomorrow?! For a modernist, on the other hand, the golden age lies in the future in which history has practically no role to play.

Recounting the past is the strong point of the revivalists, for memory, history, fable, faith and myth all combine on the basis of family resemblances to set up a formidable ideological front. A modernist could do no worse than try and rebut the enemies of progress by challenging their memories and their recall with historical facts. Pure history speaks in a feeble voice. It gains charge and charisma when mingled liberally with its cognate allies - personalised memory, faith and myths. A modernist has no answer to such multi-pronged ideological thrusts and should quickly desert this kind of intellectual battle. History is not the terrain where modernists can ever hope to win.

Many well-meaning modernists do not realise that they do their cause more harm than good by entering into debates with their opponents on the veracity of the past. They not only fare unconvincingly in these duels but they make backward-looking revanchists, who thrive on cerebral sloth, come through as intellectuals.

Modernists should instead look for other bivouacs where history and memory play an insignificant, or better still, no role at all. Modernists should not react when the past is being recalled for this is what helps the anti-modernists set the agenda. Whether it is the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the Kookies of Israel, or the Hindu sectarians in India, modernists, in their zeal for accuracy, try very hard to set facts right. But it is a futile effort. If modernists prove their point at one level the sectarians can always shift to another plane, or go back to a concocted past where only faith works. The controversies surrounding the origin of the Babri Masjid and Sita's rasoi exemplify this. It is because modernists enter into such debates that Islamic mullahs and Hindu virtuosos are now becoming objects of tweedy intellectual curiousity. Books are being written on them, by well-meaning intellectuals, as if they were Immanuel Kant or Karl Marx or Frederick Nietzsche. There are volumes already, and more are in the making, of how the Hindu right thinks (sic).

To make the past irrelevant to the present and to the future, modernists should not enter into intellectual debates with revivalists. This brings the lunatic fringe centre stage. Instead, modernists would advance their cause more effectively if they worked towards eliminating conditions that allow memories to thrive. This is how modernists carve out a separate agenda where the anti-modernists are most uncomfortable. Jawaharlal Nehru was able to rock back Hindu revivalists not by convincing them in discussions of the finer points of secularism. In fact, he probably knew nothing of how people in the Hindu Mahasabha thought, and he never felt the need to do so either. He, however, succeeded in making Muslim- baiters and Hindu fanatics look stupid because he shifted the terms of political engagement to socialism, economic development, non-alignment, land reforms and self-reliance. The sectarians knew nothing about any of this, and their long memories were of no use either. Nehru helped many even forget Partition, which was a pretty tough thing to do. Today we remember Partition again as if it happened only yesterday. Indeed books are coming out fast and thick that excavate the tortured period of Partition. That memories of Partition are enjoying a second revival today is itself a sign that our drive towards modernisation has lost its elan.

It is true that memories and the past cannot be erased simply by willpower. Neither can it be wiped out by alternative histories. The way out is to give a long berth to memory and concentrate instead on how to forge ties that promise substantial citizenship for the future. In other words, how can we make memories irrelevant to the present? Nation-states are truly modern projects. Charged with the project of promoting citizenship, they compel, for the first time, a massive scheme in forgetfulness. France would not be France today if every French person were to remember the 13th century massacres in the midi region or the bloodshed on St. Bartholomew's day. Nation-states consolidate because they are able to forget memories that would otherwise tear them from within. From 13 colonies grew the United States of America. In this short passage of time many bloody things happened, including the Civil War. And, yet, Americans as a people are profoundly ignorant about their past, and are proud of it. In India, even the long memories of Hindutva do not recall that Shaivites and Vaishnavites fought each other bitterly in the past.

But there are still many unsuccessful stories because conditions in certain nation-states do not allow people to forget. Sikhs cannot forget the tragedies they suffered when they were killed in large numbers following Indira Gandhi's assassination. Muslims cannot forget the humiliation they suffered when the Babri mosque was destroyed by Hindu fanatics. Hindus cannot forget the campaigns of the medieval Nadir Shah on the plains of northwest India. Jews cannot forget their long history from Babylon to Auschwitz. In the Balkans people had forgotten what it was to be Muslims and Christians till the war raked up such memories. Quebec separatists have openly acknowledged their debt to memory for their motto reads is `je me souviens', or, `I remember'. To ask of such people then that they forget their historical tragedies is a damn sight unfair. Yet the fact remains that such memories inevitably build walls and behind these walls the sun rises and sets with this just one burning anger.

Looked at closely, it is clear that only those memories live on that serve to separate people around a contemporary strife. So memory retention is a function of social relations. Deeply stratified societies are more prone to remember than those that are largely egalitarian in character, and where citizenship has been substantively realised. In such modern and forward-looking societies citizens relate to one another as equals. Here choices and social opportunities are equally accessible by all regardless of birth and privilege. A modernist social policy is one that strives towards creating conditions that advance citizenship. It is only by doing so that memory, history and all the baggage of the past become truly forgettable. This is the best way to combat sectarians and revivalists.

There is little purchase in attacking revanchist history with another history. That is a mug's game!

(The writer is Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.)

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