Skip to main content

Blurs of history

 


“History is the lies of the victors,” says the narrator of Julian Barnes’s novel The Sense of an Ending. The narrator is a young student when he says this. Later he will alter his opinion. When he expresses this opinion, however, his history teacher adds that history is “also the self-delusions of the defeated.” Many years later, having learnt many lessons from life, the narrator says that history is “more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.”

Memories aren’t quite reliable, however. That’s another motif in the novel. More often than not, what we remember is not what actually happened. We shape and reshape our memories to suit various purposes such as forging bearable meanings to our experiences and adding colours to our dull existence.

We do that not only for ourselves but others as well. As Barnes says in the same novel, “when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”

We have invented wonderful pasts for a lot of heroes.

You needn’t go too far into the past to understand this. Take a recent example from Kerala. K M Mani was an illustrious finance minister of the Congress coalition for many tenures. The last part of his life was mired in unsavoury corruption charges. The same left party which demanded his resignation as finance minister and prevented him from presenting the annual budget in the assembly is today planning to erect his statue that will cost the weary exchequer Rs 5 crore. A man who sold the people of Kerala to a bunch of liquor barons for a few crore rupees will stand like a hero in a city square for posterity to imagine different pasts. And Mani died just two years ago.

We fight in the name of gods who died a few thousand years ago. For the sake of the pasts we have invented for them. That’s also one way of adding sense to our otherwise senseless existence. For too many people, life would be sheer unbearable agony without those gods and their invented pasts. That’s how life is. Nothing as great as it’s cracked up to be.

That’s okay too. What’s not okay is when we insist on imposing our imaginations and inventions on others too.

Next time before we go to hand over our precious ‘truths’ to the neighbour or the passer-by, it would be good to look back at one or two of the stories we invented in our own personal histories. And remind ourselves that history is also the self-delusions of not necessarily the defeated but the ordinary mortals like you and me.


[Both the pictures above are from the Garden of Five Senses in Delhi, taken about ten years ago.]

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon

 

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    Memory can be fickle - but usually we have people around us to help measure the accuracy of our memories. Friends and family help to keep us honest. If we lack that support, of course it is possible to fictionalise. Generally, there is no harm to any other from this.

    Reinvention is another thing altogether, designed from self-delusion, first, and to create an illusion for others, second. In the second case, those who are affected by our illusion are betrayed and thus harmed. When talking at individual level, this is generally a result of any one or a combination of;
    simple insecurities
    an inability to cope with reality
    serious desire to appear other than one is for a variety of social reasons
    occupational need (spies etc)
    delusional mental states (medical)
    (other factors may play also - survival in war situation for example).


    When this occurs in the public arena the harm is to society. We do live in times of mass awareness though, the truth is there to be found and history does sort that out... one is minded of Jacques Abbadie, One can fool some men, or fool all men in some places and times, but one cannot fool all men in all places and ages. (A quote that later got rearranged and without proof attiributed to Lincoln.)

    As ever, your post has caused me to think deeply and widely! Thank you for the delightful images of the sculptures. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for adding a lot more to my post. I am worried about the reinventions happening in my country. They are insidious, to say the least.

      Delete
  2. Do we ever do anything but build stories on our own beliefs and continue to assert the same on generations to come. Your posts are worth pondering upon and offer such a wide range of perspectives..i am reading Black Hole at the moment. Just started.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Replies
    1. Not for all. How reliable? Try asking a few friends about certain events of the past and you'll be surprised.

      Delete
  4. All your writings are food for thought and have so many perspectives. The reality hits hard. This is one such piece that compels the readers to ponder upon.

    ReplyDelete
  5. What am I if not the sum total of my memories? I wonder.

    Like Yamini mentioned above, our family and friends can be good quality checks (if we are lucky enough to have them.) A lot of my childhood memories are based on the collective sharing of my family about what I used to do/say as a child.

    Your point about the expensive statue brings home the appalling and sad state of affairs in India. All that money!!

    Didn't know this Garden of Five Senses existed! Thank you for sharing your pics. Hope to visit it whenever I'm able to go to Delhi.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are more than the sum total of your memories, I'm sure. At least the Gestalt people won't let you get away with that statement. But your book is a strong proof how memories can dominate our present too.

      Garden of 5 senses is a lovely place to spend leisure in Delhi. My pics here are selected for this post. The garden is far more beautiful than what you see here.

      Delete
  6. Memories are fickle indeed, especially with the passage of time. "We fight in the name of gods who died a few thousand years ago. For the sake of the pasts we have invented for them." This is so aptly said! History may not be absolutely correct

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nothing is absolutely correct in the human world except maybe mathematical equations. The dividing line between history and myth is rather blurred especially when we deal with times long ago.

      Delete
  7. "...we invent different past"... How profound! And its real life phenomenon for sure.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If Newton had said that it would have become the fourth law of motion. 😅

      Delete
    2. Hehehe... I like that!
      PS: I dont know how but my comments have appeared under "unknown".

      Delete
    3. I was wondering too who this Unknown benefactor was.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r