The Social Frame of Historical Memory

About the Speaker

Sumit Guha graduated from St. Stephen’s College in 1974 and received his MA from JNU (Delhi) in 1976. He was awarded a PhD in History by the University of Cambridge in 1981 and returned to teach in St. Stephen's College from 1981 to 1996 (including periods of research leave.) He moved to the USA in 2000 as S.P. Das Professor at Brown University. In 2004, he joined the Department of History in Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and came thence to the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. His early research was in economic history with interests in demography and agriculture. These widened into the study of environmental and ethnic histories. His first book was The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan 1818-1941 (1985) followed by Environment and Ethnicity in India, c. 1200-1991 (1999) and Health and Population in South Asia fromEarliest Times to the Present (2001). His most recent book is Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present. A corrected Indian edition of this book appeared in 2016 from Permanent Black. His latest book The Social Frame of Historical Memory will appear later this year from the University of Washington Press, with an Indian edition from Permanent Black. Many of his writings are available on his academia.edu page.

Abstract

I will seek to present the practice of history through a wider and longer span than historians usually do. I argue that historical memory – of which history is itself a part – isembedded in and constrained by the social institutions that produce knowledge. “Social memory” is larger and more enduring than either individual memory or historical memory. It is defined by its public and societally monitored character. That in itself reflects its place in shaping human relations, in adjudicating property and sanctioning privilege by purity of blood or nobility of caste or lineage. But it is therefore necessarily made and reproduced within a framework of social and political relations that create and bound a community of thought. It also follows that the disintegration of that framing community will also cause its social memory to vanish. Sometimes past memory has left some legible trace in the historical record: more often it has not. The greatest part of human social memory has vanished like the snows of yesteryear. Historical memory has been shaped by processes of loss and of retention, decay and reproduction, catastrophe and survival. Finally, academic historians have focused on the history of their ownpractices. We should widen that perspective to encompass the many ways that socially vital memories have worked in our collective past. There have been many memory practices here well before imperial power, colonial education and nationalist projects created larger ones that still do not occupy the whole field of memory.

Report

Professor Sumit Guha detailed the new perception and redefinition of history as a collective social memory. Guha argued that despite severe geopolitical situations in the past that resulted in war, the continuing presence of a guardian class of knowledge such as academics ensured the survival of this collective memory. However, collective memory is not limited to solely literary sources; even coat of arms in medieval Spain in the territory of Castile were used as objects and symbols to prove lineages—with crucial support from the commonfolk to verify the same. In the same corollary, the use of satī memorials and hero stones in the Indian subcontinent possess a similar purpose. While the individuals depicted in these objects have passed away, their life and the situation of their death is preserved through these memorials.

However, even these memories have the possibility of redifinition—in the case of an abandoned site being repopulated by an alien settler group. In this manner, new stories are constructed to provide an updated meaning to these memorials. In several other instances, the practice of dancing and performance characteristic to certain South Asian Sufi schools of thought have acted as a means to preserve stories of their founders: Ghazi Miyan being an example of the same. Indeed, political stability often leads to a more linear form of history such as that chronicled in the annals of Rajputana during the period of the Great Mughals. With the advent of colonialism in the subcontinent, the institution of Fort William College was the first to redefine history into a more western form by training native Bengali students to write history in the vernacular while still using European modes of historiography.

By Akshaj Awasthi, Undergraduate Batch of 2021