Weaponising memory : Will India go Yugoslavia’s way? Asim Ali 28.05.22, https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/weaponising-memory/cid/1867252
Extracts:
the European understanding of the nation was anchored in racial and linguistic lines..In the late 19th century, the French historian, Joseph Ernest Renan propounded, instead, the nation was simply a community of shared memory and shared forgetting. In Renan’s view, history was a crucible of brutality, and every nation was formed out of violence. Therefore, the unity of the nation depended on keeping shared myths, shared heroes, and shared struggles alive in memory, while forgetting the darker episodes of internecine strife.
This is the context in which we must understand the Hindutva politics of avenging history that has presently gripped the country.
The Loss of Hindustan, these artificial categories were wholly illogical, conferring an “unanimity to hundreds of years of history linking the Arab kings of Sindh and Gujarat to the Ghazni and Ghuri warlords, to the sultans of Delhi and Bijapur, to the Shahanshah of Agra”.(Manan Ahmed) This exaggeration of communal divisions in colonial historiography, of course, dovetailed neatly into Britain’s self-legitimation as an enlightened arbiter of a hopelessly divided land.
Whereas many European historians had seen in the Aryan migration a story of violence and forced displacement of the native Dravidians, Nehru described the interaction that took place “between the incoming Aryans and the Dravidians” as the “first great cultural synthesis and fusion” of ancient India.
The post-colonial elite was unanimous in the celebration of these ‘shared myths’ (composite culture), ‘shared heroes’ (Kabir, Guru Nanak, Amir Khusrau) and ‘shared struggle’ (the participation of every section of society in the freedom movement) as the foundations of the Indian nation. Indeed, after its 1976 amendment, the Constitution made it incumbent on every Indian citizen to “value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture” as one of the Fundamental Duties.