Name- Sambid Verma

Course- Social Power and Social Subordination

Instructor- Nonica Dutta

Do you agree that a dialogue between memory, history and the archive has introduced new
ways of engaging with questions of social power and social subordination? Select at least
four readings in support of your argument.

Pondering over terms like history, memory and achieves, a thinking mind cannot help but think
about meanings these terms denote along with differences (if any) they carry. While one can
casually dismiss them as synonyms conveying similar meanings in a general conversation, it is
not very hard to find the stark contrasts of meanings these terms have come to represent in
academia, more so after the emphasis over ‘scientific history’ or disciplinary history (as
Gyanendra Pandey calls it) based on ‘rationality’, ‘facts’ and ‘observation’ increased. This
happened because science was rapidly becoming the tool of knowledge production in the 19th
century and the Meta narrative around it was constantly challenging the parallel methods and
structures of understanding and the construction of past is no exception.

Therefore, while history was established as a discipline of constructing the past using facts,
memory was reduced to the realms of that remembrance of past which the individual or the
communities chose to remember while the archive became a tool of recoding the version of past
sanctioned by the academics which believed in accumulation of facts to project what is also
called as “usable past” by Pandey.

To borrow the words of Foucault moreover, ‘the archive authorizes what may be said, laying
down the rules of “sayable” negating much that comes to be classified as “non sense” and
madness’1. In the light of this understanding, it becomes hard to ignore the hegemonic structure
which comes into being where history becomes a powerful tool getting the sanction of power

1
Gyanendra Pandey ed., Unarchived Histories, The “mad” and the “trifling” in the colonial and postcolonial world,
Routledge Publications, P.2
structures while memories are out casted in the vicinities as ‘the archive becomes a site of
classification and authorization and hence of making intelligible’?2

The obsession over historical consciousness based on accurate facts and in written form however
is by no means new. In fact, a historical understanding of the past was considered an essential
part of a civilized society and different understandings of past existed in different societies
having their own distinct methods of recording them. However, as the methods were distinct
from one another (very much like the notions of what is civilized and barbaric), every other
society was termed as ahistorical by the ones having a different understanding of the past. What
is evident is the fact that remembering the past was always thought essential for a variety of
purposes, but mere remembering the past wasn’t enough to call it history, it had to be produced
in the form sanctioned by a particular knowledge structure while every other dissenting form of
remembrance of the past was categorized as myth, story or the very recent addition, memory.
Derrida in fact goes on to argue that any kind of heterogeneity which challenges unified corpus
of knowledge archive offers is a “menace” or challenge to the entire theory of archive.3
Therefore, while history appears to be highly institutionalized, which makes it sanctioned,
memory appears to be independent but not in a positive sense rather in a pejorative way of ‘left
alone’. To bring it out more lucidly, it becomes anarchy in the highly ordered arrangement of the
past history, in the form of archives offers.

Understanding the privileges enjoyed by history, it becomes essential to think about the patterns
of subordination which are visible in the archival methods of recoding. The idea of strengthening
their rule over the newly acquired colonies made the colonizers look for the histories of these
areas already declared without any understanding of past. The emphasis clearly was on the
written sources of history in the fashion similar to that of Europe which obviously they couldn’t
find in the Indian subcontinent. What they found in bulk were the scriptures and sacred books
which they immediately dismissed as myths and stories. The emphasis over written sources
however by no means a colonial construct, it only gained prominence during colonization. The
very idea of literature which emerged in Europe during 14th century clearly meant literature as
something which was meant for reading. However, it became so important till the time of

2
ibid
3
ibid
enlightenment that the societies having oral method of recording the past or literature were easily
termed as ahistorical. The same inspired the British to fill the lacuna of missing history of India
to initiate a process of recording and keeping the documents in particular buildings to serve the
state which later on was called archiving.

The question of what was recorded can never be a monologue but it was treated so for a
considerable period of time which has become a matter of complain for scholars like Ashis
Nandy who constantly asks for our attention towards the absence of works critiquing the idea of
history itself which is largely produced on the basis of choice of sources. It is so because the
question itself suggests towards the more important questions of what was not recorded and why
so? While dissecting these questions one can even wonder about the question of whose version it
was which was recorded? And could it be possible that all those versions which the state did not
find fit to record and remember through archives and which were later presented as histories
were categorized as ‘memories’? Moreover, if this is the case shouldn’t history and memory be
looked in contrast with each other where history is at the place of oppressor and memory at the
place of the subaltern?

Michael Foucault in his famous book ‘Madness and Civilization’ critiqued the idea of cultural
rationality by making us ask questions like what was so mad about madness and what was so
civilized in the civilized. In the similar way I propose, in order to tackle the questions about
history and memory, we should also ask what is so historical and authentic about the histories
produced through archives and how is it different from memories. A demarcation which is
generally made between history and memory is that of the collective and the individual. While
histories claim to represent the developments of the collective accumulated over a period of time,
memories are regarded as highly individualistic which is not entirely true. Histories in fact for a
considerable period and even now largely depended upon the archival facts produced in the
archives entirely on will and comforts of the historians who already have a particular structure in
mind to write about, a critique which Bernard Cohn had to offer when he compares the tasks and
methods of anthropologists and historians. The privilege of choice however makes the visibility
of the subaltern or marginalized sections largely depend upon what Gyanendra Pandey calls the
accessibility of these sections to the archives and state representation which has been negligible
even now because these accounts largely challenge the unified corpus of knowledge archives
stands for.

The version of recoding which went in the archival document is also far from ‘collective’ and
unless somebody oversimplifies and develops the understanding that the subaltern lacks the
sense of past or the capability of passing it on from generations to generations, one can clearly
find voices of less dominant groups completely missing. The version of the past recoded in the
colonial archives was also only full of information made available to the recorders by the upper
strata of society and the facts which were considered worth recording were recorded in a way
which suited the interest of the state. In order to record what the state structure thought worth
recording, it eclipsed every other version which existed apart from the ‘official version’ and
pushed them all in the out skirts of the knowledge production, which we now call ‘silences in
history’. Needless to say, the version sanctioned and recorded by the state not just became
history but it was also in the hegemonic way established as the only rational way of recording
past because it was ‘scientific’.

Ashis Nandy offers a beautiful critique to this idea of scientific history by arguing about different
ways of recording the past which existed and still exists around the globe and how they are being
overshadowed by the idea of disciplinary history which tends to absolutize the ideas of past
which exist in different forms.4 This brings us more close to Gyanendra Pandey and his argument
of how the very idea of heterogeneity challenges the notion of archives and why has he used
archives throughout his essay in a synonymous understanding of ‘state and order’. Constantly
building the argument in the favor that the idea of disciplinary history still forbids millions of
people from entering the realm of “history”, Nandy challenges the idea that all constructions of
past could simply be dumped as history.5 Moreover, while major part of individual lives and
sufferings are still being dismissed as mundane narrations of everyday existence, Gyanendra
Pandey talks about the authenticity of the disciplinary history which projects itself as the
authentic way of constructing the past to show the complexities of human life and society by
bringing out the examples of the history of partition and memoirs of two women writers who are

4
History's Forgotten Doubles Author(s): Ashis Nandy Reviewed work(s): Source: History and Theory,
Vol. 34, No. 2, Theme Issue 34: World Historians and Their Critics (May, 1995), Published
by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University P.2
5
ibid P.3
fairly unknown. Pandey even challenges the attempts of construction of past without engaging in
the diversities of rich individual experiences.

Ashis Nandy even goes on to the extent of critiquing the idea of history based upon ‘scientific
methodology and authentic facts’ being celebrated as the counter of communal histories being
written by a lot of secular historians of India. Nandy questions the idea of scientific methods
very much like the idea of scientific development by constructively arguing that very much like
every other kind of scientific methods were used to kill and deprive people in manmade violence,
scientific history too with its claim for absolute representation becomes a form of violence on all
parallel but less dominant methods.6

This is not to get the impression to completely avoid the use of archives for constructing the
subaltern sense of past or less dominant versions of past constructions. Rather, what these
scholars argue for is a more unconventional use of sources and documents in order to break the
barrier of hegemony which the archives create. The question of breaking down this barrier of
archives and bring out those not recorded is also being discussed by a number of historians,
attempting to bring out the subalterns as their own agents in history. Talking about the question
of how we should write the colonial history based on archives, Ranajit Guha argues in favor of
reading the archives against the grain i.e. against the established truth in way that the criminals
and offenders became rebels and insurgents in his writings. Building his arguments, Guha also
asks us ‘to read the archives for what it is and not for what it is saying because no archive is
based upon absolute truths, rather it is always based upon relative truths’. However, some
scholars like Ann Stoler doubt the fact that reading the archives against the grain will help one to
understand how the truths were and are being produced and therefore she asks us ‘to read the
archives along the grain so that we can understand how these so called factual proofs were being
produced’.

Examining closely the arguments put forward by different scholars and the nuances they talk
about, we can find a number of contradictions in the dominant ideas disciplinary history and
archives usually project. To begin with, the denial of the archives to accept any other method
which challenges its uniformity actually makes it mundane rather than the diversities it

6
Ibid P.17
challenges. Secondly, while the claim that memory is the past which the individual and
communities choose to remember is absurd, history writing based on archival facts itself
becomes a matter of choice by the historians as the choice of facts construct the sense of past, the
historian is willing to convey. Moreover, the biggest contradiction in the archival exercise of
recoding which Gyanendra Pandey finds is how archive itself defeats its own ultimate purpose of
recording to produce knowledge. However, in the course of differentiating what is worth
recording and what is not, it constantly erases more than it records and therefore becomes a site,
not of knowledge production but epistemic violence and it is through this understanding that we
can open the archive as a site for looking and engaging with social power and subordinations, by
engaging critically with the processes of the so called truth productions which are far from
realities of those whose voices found and are still finding archives inaccessible.

References-

Benjamin, Walter, On the concept of History

Cohn, Bernard, An Anthropologist among the Historians and other Essays, Delhi Oxford
University Press, New York, 1987

Guha, Ranajit, The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays, Permanent Back, 2010

Pandey ,Gyanendra, Unarchived histories: The “mad” and the “trifling” in the colonial
and postcolonial world , Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York, 2014