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
Preface
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
Braiding together narratives of life experiences, processes of remembering and flattened ideas of time steeped in memory is often an act of defiance against coded histories. It defies submission to linear representation of events that often use emotive, personalized accounts as appendices to descriptions, casting them away from the body of content. Memory, in turn, is a language that speaks for those who are not written into histories. Writing on memory renders the words as if they were shores to waves, oscillating between the slippages of the past and a vast texture of imagination. Writing on memory, in effect, is about drawing on words from feeling, seamlessly. Much of the South Asian landscape, and India in particular, is replete with registers of resistance movements that have shown how collective memory has shaped political ideas about belonging. In recounting these events there is a tendency, especially within historical writings, to draw on figures and icons who were the primus motor of the Indian nationstate project. This process of writing renders those individuals and communities who struggled at the margins against the Raj, and today in post-colonial India, as residual or at best a footnote in the description.
In this sense, writing on historical figures is also a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it accentuates heroic tales of those individuals who reveal their contribution to popular fronts within nationalist movements. On the other, it presents history as forms of events frozen in time. Combining the two leads to a methodical explanation of the past that not only occludes the voices of those who speak from the margin, but also appropriates hegemonic structures of speech as the only legible form in the historical register. In this sense, memory is a form of resistance against history. Memories involve processes of ‘inscription and reinscription, coding and recoding’, making memory textured and distributive in nature. The Political Life of Memory allows me to tell a story of transition—one where shifts in power continue to shape new forms of struggles and memory politics.
This book explores subaltern memory politics in Jharkhand, a region of eastern India. I mobilize the idea of the subaltern to demonstrate the use of dominant forms of memory that erase marginal voices. I consider the ‘subaltern’ as a word, a conceptual tool, for ethnographic research that ‘enables us to look at the lifeworld of subalterns from within it’.
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- The Political Life of MemoryBirsa Munda in Contemporary India, pp. xiii - xxivPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023