INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

eing told? What does history mean to local people? How does peoples’ history reflect
current concerns?
The majority of Sikhs arrived in the city during the years surrounding the partition
in 1947 either as migrant traders or refugees from Western Punjab in the present
Pakistan. In extended conversations my interlocutors surfaced fragments of
information about their arrival in India, experiences of the resettlement in Varanasi,
the reconstruction of gurdwara buildings and how communal practices were revitalized
– all of which constitute memory histories that will scatter in the sections of
this chapter. The important “history” they had internalized and held memorable,
however, was not systematic analyses of source material but a history that celebrates
and verifies the Guru’s presence and wonders at Varanasi. In response to my insistent
inquiries about historical accounts a middle-aged Sikh woman and a good friend of
mine handed over the booklet with the history of the gurdwaras and simply said: “If
you read and listen to this, then you will know the whole history and need not to
seek anymore.” The local history of the gurdwaras and the community worked as a
meta-commentary to social histories about the adventures and hardship of individual
families. It embodied a relation to a meaningful past and revealed the self-image of a
collective group and identity at a particular location. Re-telling anecdotes about the
Sikh Gurus became the way to tell the history about oneself.
Today it appears fairly trite to state that remembering or forgetting the past is
inherently a social activity, executed in a dynamic interplay between individuals and
social groups, and that collectors of the past ‒ historians, communities, or others ‒ in
different cultures and times find either corresponding or contradicting aspects of
history memorable and consequently produce differing representations of the past.
Already in the 1920s Maurice Halbwach argued that memory must be understood
from a social framework: social groups construct memories and select what in the
past should be “memorable”. Individuals do remember things from the past, but
there is no requirement that they have had a direct experience of the historical event.
Instead the social group determines what should be remembered and how, in other
words, the group creates a “collective memory”, with which individuals identify
themselves. Halbwach distinguished between “written history”, which in his positivist
view signified the objective and textual reconstruction of the past, and “collective
memory”, which was a product of social life and exposed to changes according to the
needs of societies. 86
Contemporary historians, anthropologists and other social scientists would
hardly agree with Halbwach’s polarization between collective memory and written
history, but rather treat both as products of social groups. Scholars who have attempted
to move away from the earlier rationalistic and positivist ethos accentuate
that the important task in the study of collective memory is not so much to prove
historical factuality of social recollections ‒ how they actually tally with a past reality
‒ but in which ways individuals and groups remember, select and construct memo-
86
Halbwachs 1992.
36
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008