'Do n't you feel it? he kidded her.'The historicity'?
She said,'What is historicity'?
'When a thing has history in it.Listen one of these two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt's pocket when he was assassinated. And one was not.One has historicity...'
Thus spoke two characters in Philip K.Dick's 'The Man in the High Castle'.
Everything has a history. From a small lighter to a big nation. But what is history? A chronology of events? or much more? Presently I leave that to you!
There are two schools of thought as regards history. One school believes that history is a continuous progress. It leads us from darkness to light, to truth or optimal end.
On the other hand the other school argues that history has nothing new to discover for us.What was there to be understood and found have already been done by the long-lost civilizations and we are in fact going back to them and reconcile ourselves with the tradition.
Let me do some loud-thinking in the light of the second statement.
When Copernicus came up with the concept of helio-centric universe and elliptical orbit,did he revolutionize knowledge? A big no. Because it referred back to Platonic and Pythagorean thinking. Without the Greek atomists there would be no Marx!
Hippocratic 'Vix medicatrix naturae' is a classical statement. Do you know what does it mean? Healing power of nature. When Baba Ramdev(he has an island in Scotland!) fires salvo against(western)medicine, does he say anything new? A big no again. He simply refers back to what Hippocrates said several centuries ago. When your family doctor advises you for moderation in what you eat and drink , he simply echoes Hippocratic injunction 'Health is most likely to be found in the middle way'. Thumbing through the Encyclopedia of Folk medicine I find numerous references to Aloe Vera which was used in medicinal preparations in England and Ireland many centuries ago. When my sister goes to buy a bottle of Aloe Vera from the mega shopping mall, I just smile. She is going back to an ancient tradition.
When Joyce wrote 'Ulysses' ,he took Homeric narrative as his model. And we say it ushered in a new narrative technique? I hope many of you have read our master Lakhminath Bezbaruah's short story 'Patmugi'. How about the last lines? Are not they what the elite academics now call 'metafiction'?
The rhetoric and the rabble rousing slogans of the anti-big dam movement reminds me of Schumacher and his 'Small is beautiful' that was written in the 70s.
The list will go on. We often say that we see more than what our forefathers did. It is not without grain of truth. But we see more not because of our superior eyesight; but because we mount ourselves on their shoulders and say: 'We are taller than you."
To be continued...
Many ideas packed together, this compact passages raises some interesting questions: for instance, when we ask - 'what is history?' - where do we stand? To ask a question we need to stand somewhere. Very often, we ignore space and foreground time, but histories differ, depending on the space from where the past is seen. Edward Soja, for instance, questions the overwhelming influence of history on the knowledge-making process. The 'shoulder of giants' metaphor is fascinating. After all, what are we but the consequence of the past that we have inherited, without which we lack a background, and hence identity. What is culture but the accumulated package of collective memories that we dip into all the time to sustain ourselves?
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