One way of looking at history, i.e. accounting of past, maybe that it is how ordinarily a person or community pictures the past of the areas of their concern. This laymen's picturization receives only derision from professional historians castigating the picture as distorted or fake. But I wonder how there can be an objective telling of the past when we do not have an objective account of the events taking place this day, yesterday or a year ago despite many happenings having video records. Historians say they take up issues only when things settle down over time. And yet, an ordinary mortal does not find any help from the professional historians who with their different and often conflicting historiographies only confuse. Only an adept scholar (other than a historian believing in one's exclusive craft or historiography) can have some sense of the past from the historians' narratives and the wisdom so acquired says only that the questions are too complex to have a clear answer. Nonetheless, the human mind seeks some finality against what is the human predicament and thus human beings tend to draw a neat and vivid picture of the past too in their minds, no matter how hard historians try to make the past complicated.
In this age when there is a glut of histories or imageries of the past online, there is literally mayhem on the platform. I believe that things are being settled now thus online no matter how acrimonious they may be, and at the same time, these cut actual conflicts among people with the potential of erupting into violent conflicts. It is not to say there are no ripple effects from online to offline but on the whole, these are minuscule what could have happened otherwise. One must scan the data of violent conflicts on such accounts of the past to realise the fact of the matter.
Now, I come to another, the concluding point. These are the high times of histories' surge, which these online platforms have let these be so. But, after sometimes I feel that this media would dehistoricize the popular consciousness. This internet capitalism would cause not the end of history, as seen as happened earlier, but there would be more histories, settled, unsettled and unfolding and their exclusivity in terms of readers eliminated by open access. The dilution of the exclusivity of historical accounts as a result of their proliferation, more discoveries of interconnectedness, commonality of themes and more because of the open and easy access to these accounts would render it far less provocative, and they would cease to be a significant component of human consciousness.
Niraj Kumar Jha
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