INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

ies and how these processes are instrumental in serving political, social or cultural
aims of individuals, communities and even nations. 87 In a paper titled “History as
Social Memory”, Burke (1989) briefs a few theoretical questions to take into consideration
when studying how groups organize, what he labels “social memory” that is
shared and remembered by a social group. In Burke’s view, social memory should be
treated as a historical phenomenon on the same conditions as written records and
documents, and this memory is transmitted through a variety of means, such as
orally transmitted stories, art, architecture, rituals, habits and bodily acts. Burke highlights
the existence of cultural perceptual categories or schemata through which people
access the past. These schemas tend “to represent (or indeed to remember) one
event or one person in terms of another”. 88 Stories from the Janam-sakhi literature are
read or retold so often that they may organize people’s perceptions and memories;
the stories offer cognitive prototypes on which people are able to structure their
memory.
The collective memory is characterized by selection and reductionism, in the
sense that contextual complexities are reduced to a few stereotypical incidents and
selected persons esteemed significant to the culture which jointly will form a “sense”
of the past when structured and attributed semantic meanings. Extraordinary persons,
like the Sikhs Gurus, may even become “metonyms of history” as they embody
and motivate processes which historians would ascribe to more dispersed causes. 89
The Gurus are the chief agents, staged at the centre with supernatural power to control
actions and to whom all historical events are related and tied together. They are
the main characters to whom a causal history is attributed.
As pointed out by many scholars, a community’s need to reconstruct and remember
the past must be understood in much broader contexts of interplay between
social, political and cultural interests and attitudes in the present. Quite often these
constitutive processes occur in times of social and political upheavals, feelings of loss
and uprootedness, when people experience an urgent need to articulate a relation to
the past and create identity markers. To recreate and recurrently be involved in the
retelling of one’s own history is certainly for the purpose of commemorating and not
forgetting the past, but the transmission of collective memory carries contexts of
meanings that aim to bridge continuity between the past and the present and turn
people towards the future. What and in which way the past should be remembered
become a machinery of social and political power: by controlling the past we actually
try to regulate who we are at the present and will be in the future. In societies with
multiple social and religious identities and rival histories co-existing, the collective
memory helps people to define identity and distinguish “us” in relation to the “others”.
90 The ongoing contest between varying accounts of history ‒ competition be-
87
See e.g. Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983, Middleton & Edwards 1990.
88
Burke 1989: 102.
89
Comaroff & Comaroff 1992: 38.
90
Burke 1989: 107.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008