Online Histories

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

The History and the Social Conflicts

We have histories not the history as past is ideologically accounted. The quest for the history has ever eluded the humanity. Can there be only one history? There cannot be one but we can approximate as Max Weber does in the Protestant Ethic. Yet, people in general would not recognize the best approximation as being so. One way of determining is the democratic way. Where does the larger world stand? The statement smacks of majoritarianism or the sway of superior power but there is another test, which clarifies the issue at least to my satisfaction. Does that majority view allow the contesting view to co-exist; does the view respect the other view? If yes, then the first view is correct to me and I hold them as the acceptable purveyor of history. But the contesting view may not be benign. We must judge their worldview on the same parameters and if that does not meet the standards then the venomous part of the view must be neutralized.

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Grand Project of Self Defeatism

The people I considered fool earlier, I find their beliefs to be correct now. I had to overcome my education to realize this. One of such realizations is that the past is not there in the history texts but it remains the most formidable determinant of our genetic coding, which in turn determines how we behave. Our intellectualism lacks utterly in addressing the existential, and I realize that to be the chief factor for the trivialization of intellectualism in the country. It is our genetic coding which makes us hyper aggressive sometimes and keeps us abominably subservient most of the times. This may also be the reason for our intellectualism being a grand project of self defeatism.

Niraj Kumar Jha

History

History speaks through people. In their utterances,  in their articulations, and, even in their  silences, and in their actions and in their inactions history manifests itself. Particularly when an Indian opens his mouth, I can listen to the millennia gone by. History is there in our lives but not in our pedagogy. Most of our historians in place of unearthing the past have put massive load of earth on that. Incompetence (of a good number of them) combined with ideological disorientation has undone history in India. This problem combined with another pedagogical  lacunae, which makes one feel that text-books contain gospel truths and there is no scope for probing or questioning, makes education, whatever  we have, counter-productive. Result we can see - a menacing sway of ignorance.