Making and Unmaking of Public Memory

 Is our pubic memory melting like the timepieces in Salvador Dalí’s painting? Are we forgetting the causes we once collectively thought fitting to be engaged with?

 

From the fullness of memory the mouth speaks, the hands act, and people conduct themselves. If we need to know the reasons why persons speak what they speak, do what they do, or live as they live, try decoding their memories. We live from the past more than we live towards the future. Memories are vital for every specious, more so for humans. We take
in new information and store it in our brains, maintaining it and recalling it depending on our needs. This faculty of storing, retaining and reusing experiences and skills are informally known as memory. Everything we do or think depends on our memory, which is active every moment, receiving new information from our senses, updating existing knowledge using focus and attention, retrieving the stored experiences and skills, and planning for future activities that have not occurred yet.

Public Memory

Public memory is the recollections and circulation of the past that happens among members of a given society. According to Matthew Houdek and Kendall R. Phillips, public memory entails the acts and processes through which memories move beyond the remembering individual and become shared, passed on, and in this way, form a broader network through which people gather a sense of collectivity. We are a public, one might say, to the extent that we share a set of memories. While shared memories are rarely uniform, uncontroversial, or uncontested, the fact that certain individuals, events, places, and legacies are shared through this network of memory helps to craft us as a collective.

Public Memory Is a Constructed Reality

As an Indian I remember the wars India fought, how my country, its heroes, and people were always on the good side of good and evil; just side of justice and injustice; superior side of superior and inferior. I remember how we won our independence. I possibly remember by whom and when my country made progress. Today perhaps new narratives are competing to replace and swap memories of the above. As a Christian I remember how Israel was an elected people by God, how they repeatedly traversed to their freedom and redemption, when other nations even had to lose battles and let go lands. But curiously, all these happened hundreds and thousands of years ago; and I am not even 50 years old. Collective memory is a constructed reality. The repeatedly heard oral traditions; repeatedly read scriptures and literatures, and repeatedly reminded happening of the past construct our memory. These recollections are often not the perfect records of the past; rather they are what a community remembers; the way it remembers, the way it frames; and what it chooses to forget.

French sociologist Pierre Nora, known for his work on French identity and memory, contends that the nation-state employs the science of history to construct an official account that provides it legitimacy as the locus of identity and authority. As Nora writes in relation to 
the French experience: “History and memory were being brought together in such a way as
to become another point of reference for the nation: in this sense, national history was becoming the French memory.” Public Memory is one way in which the past is shared with future generations, and most social collectives put energy into crafting and preserving an official history.

One Who Controls Public Memory
Controls the Future
By establishing a new memory by repeating
the forgotten past we can get a people to act differently. New narratives are created by altered and infused memories. One who controls the collective memory controls the future.

Humans have the impulse to mark memories in ways that will endure beyond their life time. Cave drawings, burial mounds, pyramids, and statues were all crafted at least in part with the hope that some aspect of their experiences— lives, deaths, battles, triumphs—would be recalled by others who did not experience them directly. Various processes by which individual experience is crafted into things that can be shared, celebrated and repeated, become part of a shared, or public memory.

Today, in the era of post truth; statues, buildings, new names for existing places and institutions, etc. are fashioned to establish new narratives. New narratives propagated with statues, buildings, new names for existing places and institutions
 will give rise to new
public memory.
 People move towards
 a future created by
 their collective public 
memory.

George Orwell in his book on totalitarian world of
 Nineteen Eighty Four,
 throws light on the
‘the Party’ which
 exerts absolute control
 in its ruthless and
relentless measures to erase even the most private memories of individuals. The book proclaims loudly and clearly, “who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” In the words of Walter Benjamin, “George Orwell understood the intrinsic connection between memory and emancipation on the one hand, and forgetting and enslavement on the other.”

The Price of Melting Public Memory

Governments and establishments bank on
the short public memory of people. We as a people zealously witness people on the street protesting, farmers committing suicide, violence against women, caste and religious atrocities, politicians/leaders with corruption and abuse charges, tall promises before elections. We speak about it passionately; some of us even take part in the protest. These are things happening in our country and elsewhere almost regularly. But the perpetuators capitalise on the short memory of people. Governments and establishments know how to lie low till everything dies out, how to distract people with irrelevant stuff, how to disengage people by false propaganda and false sentiments. Most often people behave as perpetuators expect: people forget, people stop talking, people stop writing. People with the burdens of their daily life; with the need to make ends meet, get back to their routine life. And it’s only matter of time, they happen again: people are protesting on the street again, farmers continue to commit suicide, violence and abuses resurface again and tall promises are again heard through the loud speakers. The cycle repeats...

Memory

Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí’s Persistence of Memory (1931) has three melting clocks. Dalí saw time melting away like a piece of runny Camembert cheese in the sun. Historically, Dalí was caught between two World Wars. He was stupefied with the theory of relativity developed by Einstein in the beginning of the 20th century. The only clock that is not melting is the closed one; but that is being eaten by ants, which is a symbol of death and decay in Dalí’s paintings.

The Persistence of Memory examines the subconscious world and attempts to delve into the depths of human psychology. By altering and manipulating concrete objects, Dalí allows the viewer to escape reality. Perhaps truth and reality are more disturbing than distorted reality and time. Three of the clocks in the painting may symbolise the past, present and future, which are all subjective and relative; the fourth clock, which lies face-down and undistorted, may symbolise objective time; but it is devoured by insects. Its deterioration is meant to reflect Dalí’s views on the collapse of human notions of a fixed universal order. Doesn’t this century old painting speak a million words about the era we are living through?

The naked, broken branch in the painting, which art experts identify as an olive tree in the context of other Dalí artworks, represent the death of ancient wisdom, as well as the passing of peace; reflecting strongly the political climate between the two World Wars as well as the unrest leading to the Spanish Civil War in Dalí’s native country; and definitely a foreshadowing of parts of Europe getting under the ugly grip of fascist Nazi regime.

Is our pubic memory melting like the timepieces in Salvador Dalí’s painting? Are we forgetting the causes we once collectively thought fitting to be engaged with? Are we forgetting the poor? We had thousands of Indians falling outside the ambit of National Register of Citizens (NRC). I know of a person, who has served an entire life in the Indian Air Force, and his family still not found a place in NRC. The distress and trauma of thousands continue. We had the
Citizenship Amendment
Act protests after the
Citizenship Amendment
Act (CAA) was enacted by
the Government of India
on 12 December 2019. We
had the arrest of Fr. Stan
 Swami and many others.
We have the ongoing
farmers protest.

At the heart of every
issue we have a group of
people who are vulnerable, people who prone
to fall if not handled with care and compassion. The question that The Print asked in one of their opinion pieces recently should make us Indians uncomfortable, “Where is it cheaper to buy rice? At a village market in India, a country where 377 million people live below the poverty line? Or on the trading screens of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange?” Are we leaving the 377 and more million poor of India to the perils of the profit economy and the corporates?

It’s Time to Remember People

You owe your success to those who ran with you, do not forget them. The great truth of human lives is that there are people living with you. In the case of our country it is even more pronounced and unique. We live with people vertically and laterally diverse. We live with people who are lost and adrift in
the intersections of society. A boy once asked Mahatma Gandhi, “what is democracy?” Democracy is, Gandhiji replied, in your winning the race and success, be mindful that there were others who ran with you. No one wins a race by running alone. In short Gandhiji was saying,
do not forget the other. The tragedy is that we remember the other as market for our goods and services; we remember the other as vote banks.

Memory as Rhetoric

Who speaks louder, who wields power is remembered. Though it hurts us to hear; and we may question the validity of international surveys, analysis and ratings of our country, what others tell about us should ring a wake up call to introspect. Recently,
in its annual report on global political rights and liberties, US-based non-profit Freedom House downgraded India from a free democracy to a “partially free democracy”. A Sweden- based V-Dem Institute said India had become an “electoral autocracy”. India now has slipped to 53rd position in the latest Democracy Index published by The Economist Intelligence Unit, and it called India as a “flawed democracy”.

Indian authorities sidelined the statistics and ratings; it was not even allowed to be discussed in the Upper House. Of course, democracy may have a multi-faceted definition, and thus someone looking at our democracy may be subjective and predisposed. But are we ready to remember the democracy the founding fathers of this great nation envisaged and put into documents. Are we ready to look at our country through its prism? There is a disconnect. There is definitely a lose of public memory.

We Need a ‘Memory Boom’

Over the last few decades, the prominence and significance of memory has risen within conscious societies and nations. The concern with memory is best understood in relation to its increasing fragility. On the one side, memory is becoming a weak commodity; and on the other side, there is a real fear of social amnesia or forgetfulness. According to critics such as Pierre Nora, “we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left.” There is a proliferation of false memories. In his book, in one of the chapters, titled Memory Boom, Memory Wars and Memory Crises by Silke Arnold-de Simine says, Memory is so precious; but has to be distinguished from inauthentic fakes: false, mistaken or implanted memories, prosthetic, second-hand, mediated or virtual memories, trivial or nostalgic memories, or simply memory scenarios whose veracity or relationship to the real is dubious. It is much more difficult to define what makes a memory genuine.

Since the 1980s people in America and in Europe have shown interest and made efforts to go back to memory sites, museums, exhibitions, and other artifacts of memory. This phenomenon is being referred to as the ‘memory boom’.

The survivors of World War I have faded from the scene, but their children, now elderly, have brought to young people stories about families and about what happened to them in wartime. These stories become interwoven with narratives about World War II, many of which were linked to the Holocaust. Bringing to surface these memories of both world wars, and of the Holocaust perhaps have made humanity aware of the futility of exclusivity, xenophobia and war; they have made people more tolerable, peace loving, and inclusive. India needs a memory boom. Bringing to memory our past famines, independence struggles, partition and wars.

(Published in Together National Magazine)