Prisoners of the Past

Psychologically healthy people live in the present. Many of the others live in the past. They carry history on their backs like those molluscs that carry their shells on their backs. When obstacles present themselves, these people will withdraw into history’s shells saying things like: Remember our ancient glorious history when we were nation of whatever.

The plain truth is that if we look back at our real history, there is more to be ashamed of than to be proud of. Most nations have traversed inglorious paths to become what they are today. A lot of blood was spilt, women were raped, the poor were exploited and oppressed inhumanly… Even the scriptures were written to uphold the interests of certain groups only. Even our gods were subhuman!

But history is often what we fabricate. For example, the entire three centuries of the Mughal reign in India can be just erased as the new history textbooks in schools are doing. Certain people whom India regarded as villains are now heroes in the new textbooks. Those who were mahatmas earlier are now national traitors.

The present India has its own problems galore. Like poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, violence, crimes, attacks on women, and so on. Instead of dealing with these problems, if we choose to focus on our ancient glories – real or imagined – we will be deluding ourselves. And for what? To look in a rear-view mirror and feel proud?

India’s obsession with history is very unhealthy. What is history, after all? In the words of one character of Julian Barnes, “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” [The Sense of an Ending]

Worse than our obsession with the past is the sanctity we ascribe to things that were written or circulated orally thousands of years ago. We are asked to take many of those old myths and tales too literally. Like Ganesha’s trunk being a proof of ancient India’s medical advancement. Why do our leaders wilfully want us to delude ourselves?

If you are as old as I am, you will easily understand that we don’t even remember our own childhood clearly. Even what we do remember is not all that clear. Some of the memories which are indeed clear may be what we don’t want to remember. We may ascribe different motives to some of our old deeds. We may make memories look better, feel better… We do something similar with our national memories and histories too. We modify them, we make them look better than what they were.

Some of those reconstructions and modifications may be necessary to make life bearable. Fine. But why live in the past altogether? Why not embrace the here and now and make that present as good as possible?

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 462: We say that the history written as recently as the period before Modi is unreliable. Why do we then set much store by things written 5000 years ago? #HistoryMystery