The Use and Abuse of History

Agitation and mourning in Sri Lanka

- ASHIK KAHINA

HOWEVER WE JUDGE the Aragalaya that ended in Sri Lanka last year-not with a bang but with a whimper-it offered an occasion to watch and think about the possibilities and the limits of a politics reliant on historical consciousness. Whether the more liberal part of the majority demanding the island's true diversity be recognised or Tamil critics reminding us that the Rajapaksas had been criminals of the worst sort for decades before the Sinhala public took notice, the movement fomented a political discourse that called for a truer recognition of history, truth or record, blaming the denial (or ignorance) of history for the country's, and the movement's, ills.

Since the birth of the modern nation state in Western Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, history has been made to assume the role of translating us from more essential forms of identification to a selfhood grounded in the abstractions of citizenship or class. This involved a shift from the circular or eschatological timelines offered by religions and the social systems they sanctioned, in which fate and divine right rule, to the linear, progressive time in which we make our own fates and orders. This transformation is enacted most famously in the work of Marx and Hegel, but also drives the work of BR Ambedkar and Periyar.

The historical novel, born coeval with the secular nation, has been an important tool whereby the instincts requisite to the latter have been instilled in a public whose formation and status as citizenry-remains nascent and partial. In the words of the Hungarian Marxist literary critic György Lukács, "what in Morgan, Marx and Engels was worked out and proved with theoretical and historical clarity, lives, moves and has its being poetically in the best historical novels." That is, to demonstrate in abstract terms, important as it may be, will never transform human beings. But the novel can.