Interpreting History?

I do not adhere to a simplistic idea such as history being distorted by leftist school of history. Production of any work of history has a bias, no doubt. Basic ethics demands we try to both acknowledge it and minimise it. From the critical reading of primary sources, we historians project ourselves as interpreters of a certain portion of the past. While literature accepts the suggested, the bias the untold, the folded, the manifold or the unfolded… the interpretation of its narrative at different level, history claims objectivity. It interprets the text or the source but does not call for interpretation of its own narrative. True, there is historiography – how the history is written – is there to question the very ways and aims of history but still the temptation of a linear narrative looms large over mainstream history.

Let us be cognitive. Memory is a way for our brain to operate and deal with the world. Roughly put, it helps to distinguish between what we need to get familiar with and what we should beware of. It is a matter of survival and a selective process since our brain cannot afford to pay attention to every single element around us. If memory was a hardware, then history would be a software borrowing many of the processes of the former: it selects and order elements.

Let us be concrete. Say you wish to write an exhaustive history of any scene at any particular point in time. For the sake of simplicity, let us chose a simple and uneventful and apparently unloaded scene close to us, such as lunch in a canteen a day during the first week of November 2016 in Delhi. You have to enumerate and describe every element, its condition as well as its interaction, also how it got to be where it is. This means considering each single history. Regarding the persons present in the canteen (customers, staff and others), among the question to solve would be by what time did they reach? Why did they come there? How do they interact with each other? For which we need to know what is their background and all. It is important also to mention the history of the building since the way it is built will influence the way people live in it. The way it is built also has to do with who built it and who got it built and their respective history again. There we may consider the land and territory where it has been built, the furniture, the material… What about the air in the building? Where is it blowing from? The smoke in the air leading to the peasants and farmers in the neighbouring States, their practices…An exhaustive and comprehensive history of any scene in the world at any point in time practically leads to writing the history of the universe. We may reasonably consider it out of the reach. As a result, we select and build an order of things. It is built according to what seems to us the most important elements. Obviously it is subjective and interpretative. By the process of layers it even becomes inbuilt. This is why apart from cross-checking sources, and spelling out the methodology used, the best way to counterbalance this bias is to clearly spell it out and state the line of interpretation adopted.

Furthermore, historians concerned with the big picture have to select among millions of parameters, facts, events and lives trying to devise the mechanisms at play. They engage in the pain-staking work of collecting hundreds or thousands of scholars’ work to give the fragmented picture a more coherent one. Nevertheless, the general perception of history tends to become like a narrative. The past and the present offer enough evidence of the frail character of human life, and therefore we prefer playing a part in the right plot. Complexity and contradictions are the collateral damages of the macro picture. Besides invocation of the past may convey the feeling to go beyond our physical limitation travel across time, and get initiated to the secret of the great scheme of things. It may be thrilling. Some schools of thought try to draw rules from human behaviours and actions. Some prefer to believe that humans are just impersonators of forces beyond them.

Critical reading of documents and data, and cross-checking are made easier on a small scale. In the process of careful scrutiny often realise that the very object of our memory are more the reflection of our affect and preconceptions than anything else. In the smaller scheme of things, the role of historian is kind of a spoiler. The narrative becomes much less linear and unidirectional, much more contextualised. Under the magnifying glass the glossy becomes more nuanced, the smooth rougher. It opens unexpected horizons and alternate directions, dilemmas and leads to complexity.

Everything moves, changes constantly, even rivers, mountains and continents. It is the reason why the quest of origin in which the general history is often drawn is by and large irrelevant. It does not stand the scrutiny. Like any other thing on earth, humans are constantly on the move at different paths. Over a crop no grain of rice is similar and its genes pool evolve after every seeding. It is a rule of nature when it comes to worldly matters and history after all deals with worldly matters. We ourselves constantly change. Ways to feel, look, act and comprehend the world were different. I often tell students that history requires actually way more ability to re-imagine the world, leaving one preconception aside, than literature even fantasy novels.History tells us therefore that there are many other ways to go about today’s world too and to be wary of single mainstream narrative of any kind.

History is born out of movements and changes. Just as the time it is out of our reach as soon as it has gone. Our memory processes even the most immediate past just like the editing and the post production of a movie. And there will be as many memories as there are witnesses. How to give voices to the polyphony of actors with their own subjectivity and sensibility? How do we give room to unrealized or near realised possible. Some historians in France, which always had an important stream of historiography recently published a work based on the concept of uchrony, i.e. what would have happened if things went a different way?

The practice of history is indeed an attempt to escape from the clutches of unequivocal narrative and the illusion created by ways of need and convenience by our memory. It is ambiguous since it has to use the very ways of memory to evade it: remembrance, selection and interpretation. This safeguard is the very awareness of those processes, of their inner limitation and of the knowledge of alternate narratives, overlapping and conflicting. Political and religious stances may have their role to play in the interpretation of history but, as much as it is epistemologically possible, not in its making. 

(The writer is a historian and Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Shiv Nadar University)