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| With the rise of history as an academic discipline in modern times, memory has increasingly been seen as its obverse. The divide is infact about the making and the uses of cultural and social memory and the historical past. While history prides itself in methodical explorations into the past based on reliable evidence and a clearly traceable chronology, memory survives in a disciplinary no-man’s land. Memory has largely been seen as tied to the vagaries of human faculties of imagining, recollecting, and recounting, which while organically tied to a social group is prone to accretions and plurality having no universal claims. |
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| Memory always projects a constellation of linguistic, material and symbolic forms which are fluid and brisk in the present; history gives primacy to historical distance and critical reflection on the past. Not surprisingly, in some quarters memory has been seen as a victim of a strategic displacement by history as the dominant mode of engagement with the past in the modern world. Memory, from this perspective, has been seen as primal and a necessary resource of humanity in shaping its life-worlds, and history merely a much vaunted methodical fabrication. Indeed, it is also noteworthy that the recent studies around memory have tried to emphasize the spatial and rhetorical rules and immensely sophisticated techniques involved in its making. |
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| This course seeks to address this divide between history and memory by exploring some of the key issues with regard to time and narrative forms; knowledge of the past; and, socio-cultural practices and representations. The course aims to integrate the conceptual and theoretical exploration to a larger discussion on various modes of identity formation in the South Asian cultural and social context, and the role monuments, memorials, and representations of the past play. This course would also aim to address questions of the making of the contemporary and the political. |
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KEY TOPICS: |
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| Part (I) |
| 1 |
History, Memory, Identity: Presence and Politics |
| 2 |
Historical Past: Archive as Memory |
| 3 |
Cultural Memory: History of Memory |
| 4 |
Identity Formations and the Uses of the Past |
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| Part (II) |
| 5 |
The Politics of Monuments |
| 6 |
The Partition: Memories sans Memorials |
| 7 |
The Emergency and the Nation-State |
| 8 |
The Dispute around the Mosque |
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COURSE CO-ORDINATORS:
Hilal Ahmad
Rakesh Pandey |
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