No escaping history’s footprint

Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future.

— T.S. Eliot

The fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s assassination coming up this month on November 22 has become an occasion for remembrance, some evaluation, but mostly a revival of the enchantment of his brief presidency and the tragedy of his last moments in Dallas, Texas on that fateful day. CBS News plans extensive coverage, including archival footage from that day when a tearful Walter Cronkite broke the news to a stunned nation.

In the world’s most advanced democracy that gave the world the idea that ‘history is bunk’, the past is being resurrected to stand up to the glare of the present. One may well wonder why, when there are mountains of books dealing with the Camelot myth. Amazon itself lists some 40,000 entries carrying “JFK” or the full name in their titles. Reviewing a new book on JFK in July this year in The New Republic magazine, Michael Kazin was critical of the author for casting no fresh light but asserted that Americans still yearn for a “good, vigorous, sensuous ruler, one who can still make the old dreams live again.”

Others are not sure: Ian Buruma, veteran journalist now teaching at Bard College in the US, places Kennedy’s idealism against the events of the last fifty years and traces a dubious legacy that in today’s time has left America with the paradoxical image of a bully and a weak-kneed force.

It is instructive that a society self-professedly democratic --- untrammelled by the prejudices and myths of older forms of governance, monarchical, or dictatorial, a society avowedly rooted in the present -- should have to fall back on a moment in its past, to source the moral sustenance it thinks it needs to keep its self-image afloat.

Memories speak

Memories nurture societies and governance as much as rupture them. That is because the human condition consists of memories and traditions. Even revolutions need them if only to break away from them, though as the French Revolution and others later on taught us, traditions can linger in the oddest of ways.

The old monarchies thrived on a self image of omnipotence, so did fascism, and both thrust those perceptions down the collective throats as abiding principles. In fact, it is these systems which worked at erasing memories.

Democracy differs from the other systems because it allows people to retain their traditions, memories, petty hatreds and grand mythologies. Ideally, democracy allows its subjects to use its instruments to transcend the deadening weight of their hatred and accumulated prejudices so as to become tolerant of someone else’s prejudices or memories.

Democracy does not and cannot erase memories with its universal laws; no system can or did. Any attempt by liberal societies to do so would lead to Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World . In one, memory is erased through terror, the other through trivialisation. What else does the Indian Constitution do but assume that every Indian has a right to a collective memory with a duty to respect someone else’s. Its dynamism lies in allowing for ancient hatred, fears and insecurities to be overcome through its instruments of self-expression — the vote, activism and as is so often the case in India, street protests. What it does not enshrine is the erasure of memory. In this sense, it prefigured 1984 but not Huxley’s dystopia.

At first glance, the tendency in both Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi to dust a leaf or two out of the past strikes one as silly, or worse, as invitations to kindle conflagrations. Usurping the past, invoking memories for political expedience is integral to electoral politics. In the US, presidential candidates have lost their future by some skeletons from their past being thrown at them.

politics and the past

Political expediency apart, Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi cannot be chastised simply for failing to live up to an idea of democracy that erases memory.

They cannot be expected to respond only to issues of the present --- growth, FDI in retail or the anxieties over China. Both have invoked two momentous moments from our history and without meaning to, may have provided Indians with the impulse to re-examine their own memories of their tumultuous and tortured history: It’s not just the personality of Sardar Patel as Iron Man, now to be immortalised in the world’s highest statue, but the history of his time in the tortured birth of a nation; equally, the history of those assassinations of two Prime Ministers as the history of a nation’s fractured existence. And all the legacies that stayed with us even as we thought democracy would help us forget.

But all that we have done is to throw a veil of silence on our tumultuous history by leaving it to politicians and ideologues to valorise or demonise, or let it be appropriated by the world of academe from where occasional fruit fall into the laps of camp followers, librarians and book reviewers.

A good starting point might be to view the past with more maturity and detachment, as a slice of ourselves that we should not disinherit or renounce by forgetting, but through recall to understand better what we have become and wish to be tomorrow.

Perhaps, this is all the more necessary since advanced democracies have never forgotten their own past, and inflict it on a tumultuous present. In France, North African Muslims may see those secular laws banning the head scarf for women as bigoted; in Sweden, the residents of Malmo probably yearn for a pure white Christmas and regret their generosity in allowing the mud from the dirty and unwashed corners of the world to stream into their consciousness.

Maybe, both Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi may have something in common — their gift of remembrance, however tacky and expedient, to a nation willing to forget time past, and pay for it.