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.