2 - True stories

Summary

… a clairvoyant history should admit that it never completely escapes from the nature of myth.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Overture to Le Cru et le cuit,” 1966.

The very distinction between real and imaginary events, basic to modern discussions of both history and fiction, presupposes a notion of reality in which the “true” is identified with the “real” only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity.

Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” 1980.

Gods, kings, warriors, and servants, rather than capitalists, proletariat, landlords, and laborers, inhabit the pre-colonial world represented in oral texts. Preserved, transmitted, and performed as oral traditions by the Bhuinyas – a group that, ranked as outcaste, has historically existed as kamias – the traditions make the pre-colonial society of kamias and maliks appear irreducibly different from the colonial world of bonded laborers and landlords. The same can also be said about the written evidence on the pre-colonial period. Instead of the nineteenth-century picture of south Bihar as an agricultural continuum extending from the north to the south, these paint the two parts as contrasting areas which, over time, came to resemble one another because of conquests, colonization, and agricultural intensification; and they attribute this change to the actions of kings, warriors, saints, and Brahmans. Thus, the written records, too, make the pre-colonial world look irreducibly different.

But whereas the written sources employ the mode of documenting actual persons and events, the oral traditions use mythic figurations.