Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

Epic Culture – Ashis Nandy
It is no accident that Gandhi, knowing that he had to
work within a tradition primarily built on orality, also
believed history to be of secondary importance.
cannot be that easily controlled or
monitored through the state’s existing
reward-punishment system and put to
the service of the state. Indeed, the
plurality of the spiritual and the
cultural is even more difficult to
‘manage’ than the plurality of politics,
for you cannot even hierarchise, reorder
or retool revealed texts or
strains of spirituality associated with
them. Through the puranas, which
have been at the centre of the popular
culture that has kept the lifestyles and
potentialities of our communities
alive, that disorder paradoxically acts
as the binding cement of an invisible
confederation of our cultures.
It is no accident that Gandhi, knowing
that he had to work within a tradition
primarily built on orality, also believed
history to be of secondary importance.
I am not inviting you to junk history. I
am speaking of the modern love for
history that often borders on the
obsessive. In this love affair, it is
obligatory not to recognise that there
are other ways of constructing the
past, even though many societies,
including large parts of Indian society,
have lived with pasts constructed
outside history and observing other
principles.
Historiography depends heavily on
archives and on empirical data that
can be certified as reliable and
verifiable. Once under their spell, one
learns to live by them. That is the
unacknowledged, tacit theory of
memory in history; there is no place in
that theory for memory work. The
theory admits no cultivated
forgetfulness or anti-memories—
memories which are unforgettable but
which one must struggle to
forget on grounds of
compassion, ethics,
psychological health and
ideas of a good life. I have
been studying for the last
fifteen years the violence that
accompanied the partitioning
of British India into India
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