Whatever Happened to/in the Past?

One of the greatest discoveries of the last century was that the past can be invented, so much so that we now have a multiplicity of pasts. Nor is this a turn of phrase that I have coined for my own purposes here, for it is arguably the case that sometime until the nineteenth century most people used to believe that they have inherited The Past, whatever this might be, the European Past, the Chinese Past, the Religious Past, the Colonial Past, the American Past, the Scientific Past, the White Past, or the Asian Past. Now, on the other hand, we are deluged by a variety of pasts, and more and more of them are being invented and re-invented every day.

One could even say that the Pasts are up for grabs, so that one can simultaneously belong to more than one Past. As an Indian living in the UK and studying 'philosophy of religion' at a British University, for example, I live at the interstices of as many as four Pasts : the Asian Past, the Colonial Past, the Scientific Past and the Religious Past; and each of these Pasts is being reexamined, reconceptualised, and recontextualised every passing year. One can think of my own Past therefore as a gigantic river in spate into which these four historical tributaries have merged, and yet merged without losing their distinctive identities.

There is, of course, a certain sense in which being told that you are the inheritors of The Past gives you a sense of 'security' : you know where you have come from, where you are today, and which way/s you are moving along. This is why History can be such a powerful tool for guiding people into the next generation : it can tell you that the Past was logically inevitable, and that the Future will follow as its logical consequence. Certain forms of 'determinism' (whether scientific or religious) take it yet further : that we do not really matter, for it has been decided which road we shall take at every fork even before we arrived onto the scene.

Most socio-political debates, however, emerge from this illusion that we have been handed down The Past in an indiluted form, and that it is our bounden duty to do or die for this One Past. I shall here take two examples from the (pan-)Indian context to show why we must strive to get ourselves rid of this illusion, and the sooner the better.

The first concerns the 'sovereignty' of a state called Assam (think of Assam tea) in the north-eastern part of India. There are some people in Assam today who believe, to put it precisely, that 'Assam was never a part of India' and there are many others who claim that 'Assam has always been a part of India'. As a matter of fact, people in neither group seem to have read their histories carefully, and consequently have made the category mistake of thinking that there was a real entity called 'India' before 1947, which is the year when the British left 'India'. The truth of the matter is that there was no geo-political unit called 'India' before Independence, and the India that we see on our maps today is largely a product of the schemes of the wily Sardar Patel. Therefore, the fundamental question is not over The Past : 'India' did not exist before 1947, and to ask the question, 'Did Assam belong to India before 1947?', is as ridiculous as asking this one, 'Was Julius Caesar angry when his computer crashed?' Instead, the basal question here is over a possible present : should Assam remain in the Indian Union today?, and this question must be answered only after taking into account the multiple Pasts that have made the Assamese people what they are today.

The second concerns a similar set of issues related to the support that certain political parties in India receive from ex-pat Indians in Europe and the US. Some of these ex-pats seem to harbour certain kinds of conspiracy theories about how the 'West' has been exploiting India since time immemorial. Once again, a fictitious entity called 'India' is invented (not to mention the other one, the 'West'), whereas as I have pointed out in the earlier example there was no such reality before 1947. Whether or not people who live in the zone that we call 'India' today ever regarded themselves as being members of one socio-cultural unit in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries is something that must first be demonstrated, and not assumed to be true at the start of an argument. Therefore, instead of allowing oneself to be deceived that we Indians have been granted the immaculate gift of The Past, we should analyse this very past, and a careful scrutiny will reveal that there have been many streams which have flowed into this Past. Indeed, it will then become clear that some of these streams were 'Western' in origin but have now become so inextricably a part of our own Indian past that they cannot be isolated any longer as such.

Therefore, let us return once again to the past, and when we have drilled our way through it, we may hopefully emerge into a possible future. And when that future, now seemingly distant, becomes our present and is later cast into the past, it shall be time again to repeat this process all over again.