Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Part I Context and Theory
- 1. Introduction
- Part II ‘Historical Memory’
- 2. Claiming the Munda Raj from the Margins
- Part III Ethnography of Memory, Objects and Resistance
- 3. Memories Set in Stone
- 4. ‘Burying the Dead, Creating the Past’
- 5. Echoes from the Graveyard
- 6. Conclusion
- Appendix
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
3. - Memories Set in Stone
Political Aesthetics and the Statue of Birsa Munda in Post-colonial Jharkhand
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Part I Context and Theory
- 1. Introduction
- Part II ‘Historical Memory’
- 2. Claiming the Munda Raj from the Margins
- Part III Ethnography of Memory, Objects and Resistance
- 3. Memories Set in Stone
- 4. ‘Burying the Dead, Creating the Past’
- 5. Echoes from the Graveyard
- 6. Conclusion
- Appendix
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In any community, remembering the dead is filtered through techniques of memorializing, sometimes at the behest of the dead themselves. These techniques often focus on material substitutes for the absent person. Their design and their very materiality seem intended to defy forgetting by solidifying the deceased, as if they have not gone and our relationship with them has not been changed by their departure. Though these objects help us remember, they also help us forget, by selectively controlling ‘how’ we remember and forget. Yet, ultimately, even the most interactive object is relatively passive: it may have agency, but how far can it argue, negotiate, or be persuaded to change its mind?
—Piers VitebskyDrawing on the historical background of the Birsa movement, this chapter traces the making of Birsa Munda's statue in contemporary Jharkhand. It makes this leap from the previous chapter—anachronistic in nature to distil the reproduction of Birsa's persona through emergent forms of memory politics. The chapter construes history as not merely a scale of time defined by ruptures but rather an unfolding process, each co-constituting the other. In this schema, the Birsa rebellion becomes not only an event of the past. In doing so, it draws on Reinhart Koselleck's idea of history that is characterized by different notions of temporal and spatial existence. These temporal modalities include the process of remembering—the memory of the past as one of the key features. It does not approach the past in an ‘objective and disinterested manner in order to construct a picture of historical reality by which to measure the falsity of various ideological constructions thereof ‘. Rather, it treats history as an image of the past that has not ruptured from one moment to another but is instead unfolding. But it also spills over—making slippages and continuing ‘traces’ through imprints of memory of people, communities and the institutions. Memory becomes an image of the past that resists the emergence of the historical. It flattens the time in which modernity is imagined.
In other words, as Prathama Banerjee in her work has shown, ‘the internal presence of the “primitive”’, the non-modern, inspires the imagination of temporality as chronology—that is, as an abstract numerical series. Consequently, it can be argued that it is the presence of the ‘“primitive” which makes historicality possible in the first instance’.
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- The Political Life of MemoryBirsa Munda in Contemporary India, pp. 93 - 152Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023
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