National

When Amnesia Is A Handy Tool

Specific political projects need specific memories to generate national sentiment

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When Amnesia Is A Handy Tool
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Memory is a production, never a simple fact that is recovered haphazardly, like a found object hidden by time. The content and meaning of memory emerge with effort, like the interpretation of dreams. Repeated memory production becomes routine, effortless, even automatic. By being attached actively to something in the present, memory fills the present with meaning, creating equivalence, colouring the present with sentiment and symbolism. Forgetting is less about erasure than about censorship. To forget is to cut connections between events in the present and past, to give both definite colours.

The media production of public memory evokes an equivalence between specific events in the present and past to guide thought for whole populations in their efforts to make sense of their world. Media makes some memories work as meaning-makers by making some events in the present and past positively equivalent and making other connections inappropriate, nonsensical, even unthinkable. In the US media, events on September 11, 2001, recalled Pearl Harbor, not Hiroshima, as nationalists enriched the national self-image of virtuous American innocence, which was then mobilised for wars sold to the public as a just response to unprovoked foreign aggression. The production of memory thus generates national sentiments that support specific political projects.

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It happens in India all the time. Bullets fired on protesters in Kashmir—and now the discovery of countless unmarked graves—do not evoke public memories of Jallianwala Bagh, for now the nation that was then suppressed by British imperialism is defending itself against threats to its life derived from the injustice of Partition. Kashmiri fighters slipping into Pakistan for help in their national struggle do not recall Bangladeshi fighters travelling to India for the same reason; nor do they evoke memories of Subhas Chandra Bose leading the Indian National Army, raised by Japan, out of Burma.

History is a memory-maker that keeps some events safely in the past, detached from the present, while it keeps other events very alive, often with dramatic embellishments. National pride in India’s rise to world power gains strength from public memories of colonial subordination, but the inequity of liberalisation since 1991 does not evoke educated public memories of India’s economic exploitation by free market imperialism. Increasing inequality in India today does not evoke memories of forced inequity in British India. Many millions of deaths by hunger in independent India do not seem equivalent to colonial famines, aggravated by public policy, recalling 1943-44 in Bengal.

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Dominant political projects require active censorship of public memory. In India, the historical reality of idealistic nationalism must be kept locked in the colonial past, to disallow any possibility that public sentiments might be stained by its living present, palpable in struggles for independence from India today. Memory cannot be allowed to evoke empire in the nation.

(David Ludden is professor of Political Economy and Globalisation in the department of history at New York University. He has written several books on India.)

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