How reliable are our memories? Not much, as a source of objective truths. Memories do play a vital role in our lives for various reasons. But if you think your memories are the true records of what really happened in the past, you are mistaken. “Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past,” says Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich in her book, The Unwomanly Face of War. Memory doesn’t merely remember what actually happened but re-creates it.
The narrator of Julian Barnes’s
novel, The Sense of an Ending, says rightly that what we end up
remembering isn’t always the same as what we have witnessed. We add colours and
patterns in order to make painful realities more acceptable. We “adjust,
embellish, make sly cuts,” as Barnes puts it.
We don’t do it consciously. We
are not being villains by adjusting, embellishing, and making those sly cuts. On
the contrary, we are doing our best to make sense of what has happened.
Life has no intrinsic meaning.
Whatever meaning it has is given by us. Unless we add those meanings, life will
be unbearable. The sheer absurdity, ridiculousness, villainy, perversion… of what
we did and what was done to us by others will weigh us down like millstones
around our necks without the rearrangements we do to our memories. Actual
memories can be brutal monsters. Modified memories are palliatives.
Svetlana Alexievich goes on to
say that educated people’s memories are less reliable because “they are
infected by secondary knowledge. By myths.” Educated people have additional
reasons for modifying memories, in other words. Their knowledge about a lot of
related issues comes into play and reshapes memories substantially.
This is the case of events
that happened to us. What will be the case of events that happened long, long
ago? Centuries ago?
We rely much on history for
understanding our past. How reliable is history? How much of it has been
reshaped by various people for various reasons?
In the last few years, India
has been trying to reshape its history, both recent and ancient. Since we
possess a lot of literature about the recent history, we have ways and means of
checking the modifications done to that. But what about the history of
centuries ago? What happens when a country decides to re-create a 5000-year-old
past?
We will get new myths, that’s
all. As individuals we reshape our memories and some of them end up as myths which
console us for our failures, comfort us in our moments of grief, give us hope
in times of despair… Is India trying to do the same as a nation? Create an
alternate history that soothes our national ego? Create a new myth in which we
will appear as some colossal heroes while others [like the Mughals and the
British] become villains?
What purpose does it serve in
the end? Are we hoodwinking ourselves? The world is not going to be hoodwinked
anyway.
The assertions of Svetlana Alexievich are true to a great extent in my humble opinion (as a human-being and as an ex-student of Psychology). And yourself are nothing but accurate only in asserting that the world is not going to be hoodwinked anyway. The hoodwinkers can hoodwink themselves (and a sizable part of Indians) only.
ReplyDeleteSizable part - that's the problem. How can millions be hoodwinked so easily!
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