[Reader-list] writing alternative Histories

[sadan]

Dear all, i have found an interesting discussion on alternative histories. 
would like to share with you
sadan.

link 
http://www.transforming.cultures.uts.edu.au/conferences/remembering/discussion1.html

Discussion  1: Event, Metaphor, Memory
w/ Shahid Amin, Fiona Nicoll, Michael McDaniel, Kim Mahood

?historical fieldwork: a dialogue at the present site of past actions?
Shahid Amin


history truth & uncertainty

Q: Can academia write moral uncertainty into history and memory in Australia? 
or does moral uncertainty need to come from outside the academic structure in 
Australia? Is there something in the structure of Australian academic 
discourse that requires the production of moral certainties?

Shahid: I guess all I have to say is I don't know, right. [laughs] But I guess 
another way of looking at it is ask whether today the only viable statements 
that academics make are definitive statements, or whether academic history is 
only, and can only be the truth of a certain kind of certainty. And if it's 
not, then it is not academic history.

I guess what -- even if we keep the prefix out, just concentrate on 
uncertainty of whatever sort -- economic, political, cultural, moral -- I 
think there is some kind of a need for a rethink. Also when you connect the 
production of academic writing to uncertainty, because you can produce 
uncertainties without it being produced in the academe. Implied there is that 
there is a certain play off between persuasion and proof that academics 
normally deploy. Most academic writings are not only proof-based writings. 
There is a certain amount of persuasion in that, and whether the kind of play 
off between persuasion and proof changes as you raise questions whose answer 
is not amenable in terms of the solid proof. ?Lord Curzon said this about 
Indian peasants. And sent a telegram to the Secretary of State, and before 
sending this telegram, the telegraph office said 'Clear the line, Viceroy's 
message follows.' ?

So I think that what I take your question to imply is whether history writing 
by academics can be persuasive, precisely because it now seeks to establish 
new notions of proof which have to be adequate to the new questions that are 
being asked. So that if you want to know about what the Indian soldiers who 
were sent to the French front in the First World War felt like, you're most 
probably not going to get their letters, because those letters were preserved 
only for English soldiers in the Imperial War Museum. Because this is the big 
thing about the First World War, and literary and other memory and literary 
production. What you get is the report of a censor established in Flanders to 
find out what these black Indian soldiers felt, and what we will then get is 
not the letter with the censored portions of the letter. Now, that's all 
you're going to get. And so that what these people actually wrote 
successfully by-passing the censor is lost. So I guess these are some of the 
issues that I can relate to. It goes back to my earlier point about the 
evidence of the archive, which is always assembled for somebody other than 
the historian. You know, this is purely a rhetorical sentence, when the 
historian sits to write, because the state doesn't provide evidence for the 
historian. The state provides evidence for other functionaries of the state. 
And so that before the historian arrives, somebody else has already been on 
the scene, to use that evidence and digest it. And the term digest, law 
digest and so on, is a nice term, because the state function is to both 
produce and digest the material. It's then, later on, that we follow the 
tapeworms! Oh, the earthworms, sorry!

Top...

memory identity & oppression

Heather: The role of the historian?

Michael: The role of the historian? That's a big one, that's bigger than the 
last one? This is about truth, isn't it? It's about truth and certainty. I 
don't know that you can ever know that you've got it, I think the problem is, 
the only problem is, in everything we talking about, you know, is that you 
can't get certainty and truth. There are situations where you're more likely 
to get it, and situations not. But then again, it's your political or 
historical position that decides that you believe that this is more certain 
than the other thing. I just sort of -- you know, you can go into an 
Aboriginal community, you can go into a family, and people have got -- you 
can go into a nation -- and people have got different versions of the truth. 
They're different histories, different memories. It's not problematic. That's 
history. It's not problematic. It's only problematic when you try to record 
it and use it for a particular purpose. It's like if you're in the pub 
telling a yarn, or you're at home round the kitchen table or doing something 
or other, you scrape a few stories together, a few memories from here and 
there, a little bit of this memory, a little bit of that, someone else's 
story. That's the purpose at the table.

And you know, it's like putting things into a tool kit, and the tool kit that 
you need to take to this particular job for this particular task. But if 
certainty is one of the things you need in that box with that bunch of 
stories, it's always going to be problematic. You're always going to be 
sitting around saying, who's got the truth, who owns the truth. The trouble 
is that institutions insist on -- particularly western institutions -- insist 
and want the truth to be static and correct. And want to nail it down 
forever. There's this constant pursuit for something that just can't be 
nailed down. And I think that's it. That's the argument, and I don't know if 
there's any answer for it. That's just simply what we're doing, trying to 
talk about why do we change all the time? We change all the time cause it 
changes all the time, and there's no certainty in it.

I would even question some of the most certain things that I've heard in my 
life as ?truth?. I mean some of the things that I imagined in my life that 
were absolute fundamental truths that underpinned my life, I now don't 
believe at all. It is constantly changing. I'll tell you another funny little 
story. All I can do is tell stories, right. You know, if you ask me who I am 
now, I'll tell you I'm a Wiradjuri man and blah, blah, blah, and I come from 
this long line of oppressed people, etcetera, etcetera. From central New 
South Wales, and I can tell you all the government policies and etcetera. But 
in fact I have to tell my Nan how oppressed she is and how oppressed she was 
at the time, because she doesn't know. She was too busy being a Salvation 
Army sergeant-major at the time, and raising nine kids on the edge of town. 
Now, she didn't -- and I've got to tell her about this. She didn't know about 
terra nullius either until I told her?

Q: what did she think of it?

Michael: She just didn't really care. And how when I was a kid, there was the 
Captain Cook Bicentenary -- 1970 -- and we all raced up to the petrol station 
and bought these cardboard Captain Cook hats. And we put them on, and Nan 
took us up the street and we watched the float, the Endeavour float go by. It 
sent fire crackers out this galvanised pipe at us! And we cheered and 
clapped. Now, was I oppressed at that time? What's the truth of it? What's 
the truth of it? I don't know. I know now I look at it differently, and 
perhaps my children will look at my life differently. I can't pin the truth 
down. In my life, so many things have changed. And I don't know if that 
answers the question, but?

Shahid: ? There's a question about should writers of fiction be introducing 
this element in the popular discourse, or should intellectuals who are not 
academics be engendering it. I guess somewhere that's the point that is being 
be raised.

Fiona: Yes, because there's an assumed burden of responsibility, particularly 
at the present very polarised political moment, that you know, would make 
this sort of ambivalent, and you know, partially contradictory realities of 
life, difficult to express. But I mean I think that also, that makes it quite 
difficult to say anything really, you know.

Q: I've got one that just follows on quite sort of directly from what you were 
just saying. And I think it probably relates to what all of you have spoken 
about today. Especially Shahid and some of your work, Kim. Just an idea that 
-- well to start with, Shahid, you said that you still wanted to see yourself 
as a historian, producing historical discourse, despite the fact that it has 
come historically from 19th century, white -- it's been very much part of the 
colonial program -- but that you still saw something valuable in that and saw 
some purpose in that. And that the alternative histories that you've proposed 
are there to challenge or to problematise that history of domination, that 
single history which sort of speaks from the position of power and creates 
the power which dominates people. And so I guess what I wanted to say was, 
don't you find that there's a dialectic between, all right you can 
problematise history by introducing all the uncertainties or the voices which 
had previously been broken down, oppressed and not spoken, but by doing so, 
the actual power of historical discourse, its ability to dominate, its 
ability to give its speaker authority, is also broken down and is also 
brought into question. And I guess in my mind I just have this image that, as 
Michael spoke about, the state is asking the people seeking native title to 
delimit on a map their area, even if they never understood their ownership or 
their dwelling in the country that way. It's like your image of the fence, 
beyond which nothing is changed, and on this side of it everything is subject 
to change. In my mind, there are two sorts of history -- there's the 
monumental history which y throws up the monuments to you know the colonial 
dominator. There's the archive which is supposedly transparently representing 
the truth of the matter, and then there's the history which is questioning 
that, and introducing all of the actual, you know, uncertainties. One of 
those seems to be the one that has the power, the other is always contesting 
that. If that contestation was taken to its logical extreme, then there would 
be no power. What do you see as the value of doing that?

Top...

politics and relativism

Shahid: In the talk and also in discussion, I've begun to categorise myself as 
a practising historian. Somebody who just doesn?t do research, or has a 
perspective but who tries to write things that are read by other people. And 
I say that for two separate but interrelated reasons. One has to do with the 
kind of work that I've done along with other people in this collective. And 
there has been a tendency in India to some extent, and also outside, to 
castigate all new ways of writing as writing which is alternative to history. 
And therefore, is not only irresponsible, shows lack of identity, shall we 
say, to the discipline. But merges into myth, whatever that is?. So there?s 
nothing?.there?s absolute relativism and so on. And there has been a tendency 
to say that Subaltern Studies has lost itself, as far as history's concerned. 
They're no good. They may be doing something else, but they're not doing 
history. And I want to have a rebuttal to that. First -- because I think 
history, especially in India, is too important a resource, quote-unquote, for 
it to go away. And in order to contest mainstream history which is seen to be 
the only history, or in order to contest fabrication of particular pasts as 
obvious counter to deracinated histories of people who are not responsible to 
the aspirations of the Indian Hindu resurgence, one needs to say that, you 
know, we can't -- at least in the Indian case perhaps, I'll stand corrected 
over here ? I, the historian cannot just stand by and say, ?well my past is 
as good or as bad as your history?. I'm not saying your past doesn't make 
sense. But for it to be elevated to history, would need two things. First, we 
go into absolute relativism. Who are you? You have got a PhD, I?ve got a PhD, 
and your history?s as good or as bad, and that's what we are seeing in India 
today. That there is an attempt consciously to do away with whatever 
intellectual capital historians have. So that a kind of majoritarian view of 
the past can very easily, say, lay claim to effective truth which could or 
could not be historical truth, but that's the truth that now matters. And 
that's why I want to stick my neck out and you know, spread myself all over 
this circle that I am in, and say, well there is history and there is history 
and there is -- alternative histories are not alternatives to history. They 
are not necessarily written outside the profession. The profession is big 
enough to have experiments going on within the professions, because this is a 
very important issue and a very important battle. Not only in terms of our 
colonial past, but in terms of how communities with different and conflicting 
pasts are going to live in India today. Something that I'll be talking about 
tomorrow. So I know that that, to some extent it does do away with the power 
of historical discourse. It's an alternative principle, shall we say. That it 
really grew up with the 19th century German historiography and so on and so 
forth. But as I was saying earlier on, we should try and broaden the kind of 
questions that historians can legitimately ask and give answers to. So that 
is just -- that is a psychological question. That is the question for 
indulgists. That is the question for the anthropologist. We say that well, 
there is a whole sort of questions that can be asked of the past by 
historians, who are inventing themselves, reinventing themselves. And this is 
very important.

Top... 

history as story telling

Q Without dissolving into storytelling?

Shahid: Well, all history is storytelling. That's why, just as all evidence is 
all oral evidence. Short of when you?re writing a cheque or a bill or a 
marriage contract, where the actual signature is the event, everything else 
is a reported speech! When the police, you know, write the report, they are 
hearing something that somebody else is telling them and writing it down. So 
story telling, or the telling of stories perhaps, story telling is a way of 
being, shall we say? as Benjamin says. But all histories are stories, but 
that doesn't make it that any story is as good or as bad as the other one. I 
mean I did talk a bit about this idea of the tellability of stories. Not only 
whether you can tell them, spin them as stories, but that they have to be 
supported with some kind of rules or evidence and so on. That's the 
difference between me and a novelist and that's the difference between me and 
an anthropologist. I can't just choose -- go into a village and say, ?oh this 
is not the best type of village I wanted to study to work out the interface 
between class and caste. I'll go to another one which will be ten miles from 
a radio station, two miles from a petrol station, etcetera, etcetera, that 
will enable me to find out how social change and global isolation is 
affecting India?. The event is given to me. There is that kind of limitation. 
And I then try and jump into it and say, ?well, let?s not just talk about the 
event, which was a few hours of murder and mayhem. Let's talk about its 
pre-history, which was one and half hours of peasants talking about Gandhi?.

Q I was interested, Fiona, when you were talking about, as part of your paper, 
just sort of briefly mentioned -- I don't know if it was criticism, but a 
comment at least -- on the role of historians, and in particular Henry 
Reynolds and Peter Read, who have just recently taken a bit of a shift in 
writing stuff -- Reynolds with 'Why Weren't We Told?' and Peter Read with 
'Belonging' I think it's called. Moving into this kind of memoirs or 
reflections, say, like an engagement with -- so that as historians the sort 
of stuff they're reporting on, they've shifted towards looking at their own 
subjectivity, or their own cultural shift and change in engagement with the 
issues. And that's sort of become something that's part of the -- almost like 
in a linear way -- part of the history as well. Their experience and 
encounter with the material as historians, and their personal reflections on 
that. So not necessarily a criticism of that, but it's an interesting thing 
that's emerged. And it kind of, in a way, gels with the presentation that you 
made, Kim, in thinking about memoirs and the struggling with ideas around 
cultural identity and one's history and how you can re-engage with one's own 
individual history. And I'd just be a little keen to know more about what 
process you were thinking about in re-engaging with that personal history and 
representing that now.

Fiona: One thing I noticed, particularly with Henry Reynolds, was there's a 
shift from almost looking at Australian race relations from the outside, 
counting casualties of frontier wars, to his role within it. Which I see as 
part of a self reflection on whiteness. But I am also aware that it's the -- 
he doesn't really go into -- he says he's from Tasmania -- but he doesn?t 
really go into like his family history there. And actually -- unfortunately I 
didn't get to the end of that paper, because I was actually going to posit 
white family histories as a -- as another way to get around that position of 
the disembodied, unimplicated, white observer. So yeah -- which is a 
different concern from the concern that Gillian Whitlock, who was discussing 
both Read and Reynolds, brought up, and she was concerned -- which I felt was 
quite a valid concern -- that you know, the baby was being thrown out with 
the bath water in terms of what history as a discipline has learnt from 
post-structuralist debates around textuality. Yeah, so I'll know throw that 
to you.

Top...

art and memory

Kim: In terms of going back and looking at that place that I'd grown up in, 
there were sort of two things going on. One, it was -- and as you would have 
picked up from the artwork that I showed you -- there's a level at which I do 
work very unconsciously. I have the privilege, in a sense, of being a visual 
artist, which means that I've never made any money, so I don't have to worry 
about leaving behind all these possessions that I've accumulated, and taking 
off and pursuing these drives that, you know, to actually sort of follow this 
thread wherever it takes. And I was at a point before I made the journey 
back, that I realised I couldn't move anywhere in my own life without 
actually going back and dealing with this stuff, which had become -- I mean 
it's mythologised terrain anyway. You know, the ?outback?. This family that, 
you know, and that we have stories, all sorts of stories about, you know, the 
family that goes out into the wilderness and builds up a life out there. 
There's lots of that kind of anecdotal history in Australian writing. And it 
was just not holding for me, you know. And I needed to go back and find out 
in a sense whatever was out there. And of course the other thing that had 
happened, as I said, was that that particularly property had also become 
Aboriginal land. So -- I had no idea what to expect. But I had some sense 
though that what I was doing, that that story, what ultimately led me to 
writing about it as well, was that it did engage with what were becoming the 
big cultural debates in Australia. And that in my own way, maybe I could 
contribute something by attempting to ?. register and clarify, as honestly as 
I knew how, what that experience was about. So, at no point was I sort of 
positioning myself as a voice of authority. We just actually had this 
discussion about authority and voices in the group I was with. But -- I had a 
sense from my own experience that all those contradictions -- some of the 
things that Michael's talked about too -- are the reality of what we're 
dealing with now. You know, that the classic mythologies don't hold any more. 
And to go back to the previous questioner, I certainly had no particular 
sense of trying to undermine the thing. It was already breaking down, it 
wasn't holding. I had nothing to do with breaking it down. And I think that's 
happening overall with those sort of big narratives, you know, they were 
breaking down anyway. What people are doing now is trying to deal with that 
breakdown, you know. And all these other stories are surfacing regardless. So 
--- I guess -- yes, I went back, I made art work, I wrote a story and there 
it is.

Q It follows directly on that question about how to use family. It was: how do 
we remember the skeletons in our closets, the sort of embodied family 
experiences, without repossessing the privilege of the white heterosexual 
family? How do we in fact do that?

Top...

challenging white hetersexual histories

Fiona: I think -- and this came up in the group -- I think by taking on board 
the consistent demand for reparations as a consequence of the recognition of 
sovereignty, so that actually the acknowledgment of the family history, 
rather than the amnesia is accompanied by an effort to redress the effects, 
the gross imbalances in you know, living standards, and resource ownerships 
between the indigenous and the white immigrants to this place who've directly 
benefited. My -- I'm not sure how the state is going to do that, because -- I 
mean Michael pointed out, you know, the ridiculous ironies that have grown 
out of native title, which was presented during the Keating era as one means 
for redress anyway, particularly through the Indigenous Land Corporation. I 
think -- to me that's where I'm at. The reconciliation state-sponsored 
process has come to an end. It's like who is going to do it? And what do 
white citizens do in a situation where the state is not moving towards 
recognition and repatriation?

Top... 

writing lightly

Q You talked about that in alternative histories, you can't always rely on the 
fact that the reader's going to be familiar with the story or the area that 
you're dealing with. And then you went you went on to say -- and I'm not sure 
exactly -- you know, you said something like we need to overcome the details 
of the unfamiliar -- I assume that if -- and then you said -- which may choke 
the narration. What sort of interests me is this, you seem to have done it in 
your book. I mean I read it and I didn't know hardly anything about Indian 
history, but you've used certain approaches where I could get into it. It 
wasn't a problem, and I just wanted to hear really some of the approaches, 
problems you had in that sort of writing.

Shahid: There are a couple of things that I did. First, I researched it for 14 
years intermittently. To say that I worked on it for 14 years, it suggests 
that I really think you can?t really produce a book in 14 years. I?ll retire 
if I take that long for my second book by the time it comes out. But you 
know, so that in some ways I made a conscious decision that I'll try and 
write about this event, which was almost a phrase, you know. There's this 
violence that takes place in 1922 in the name of Mahatma Gandhi, and cannot 
really be written as a sentence, because the subject of the sentence has to 
be Mahatma Gandhi, who obviously is against this violence. So this violence, 
this strain of violence has to be a phrase, after which you put a comma, and 
say ??. which made Mahatma Gandhi call the whole thing off?.

So the challenge that I faced was it would have been much easier in some ways, 
but less exciting, to do a critique of the way this has been triggered. But 
you know, if you want to take this seriously then you must really write a 
narrative where not even a sentence existed. And therefore the narrative 
challenges were very great. Which was possible, not by discovering some kind 
of style, but having so much detail that you could write lightly. So that 
writing lightly comes from a tremendous amount of material that you have. If 
you have less material, then your writing tends to be stodgy as a historian. 
So that was the first thing.

Top... 

memory as ?voice over? to authority

And the second idea was -- which many historians have done, Portelli does it 
for example -- and in a way, it goes against the way we have been trained as 
historians -- that you know, a fact is not exhausted by its first or second 
use. It can keep coming back again and again. And you can deploy it in ways. 
If you go to a small town in India and you ask for the local newspaper, they 
won't show it to you, because they say that only one piece has been written 
on that newspaper and the son and grandson of that newspaper is going to do 
it, So that's like saying, ?Ah, you?re writing a book on India? Oh but there 
was another book on India! ?? But that's the way historians work. So that, 
you know, ?Oh, you worked on sugar cane, there has been a thesis on sugar 
cane. How can you write another one?? Which, translated to the level of fact, 
you know, ?You?ve used it once, now get me another one!? But you can bring 
that over and over again, which also means that you know, you don't move from 
one monumental demonstration of historical facticity to another. There is a 
certain excess that is there in the way you describe things and then you are 
able to get that back again and bring it again in another context.

What I found most liberating and enabling when I sat down to write, was this 
experience of what I call historical fieldwork. That is, that I march 
outwards from the archive. I only know my respondents as relatives of the 
writers, as a policeman would have known. And then we have an unequal 
exchange because all the state?s markers are there and so on. But I dialogue. 
Where I don't just say, ?oh how interesting?. Because I already know what is 
the official version. So the interest is not what is novel. How the novel 
plays on what is known. And because you know, the memories, in order to be 
?authentic? memories, can't be complete variance with what was the truth as 
established in the court of law. Because what happened in the court of law 
was literally, as I say, a matter of life and death for them. So you keep 
getting these voices or voice-overs, shall we say, on what is officially 
known. And that then allowed me the freedom to decide when I'm going to 
relate one element of the story after which previous ones. So the memory then 
didn't figure as something that is opposed to fact. Memory or recall is a 
kind of a take on what is known and the gap between the two opens up the 
space for the next chapter.

So when, what gets told after which chapter is in terms of the reader having 
been brought to a situation where they say ?Well, this is what the quote 
said, but why is this guy saying this? But others saying ?Oh, this guy 
obviously has forgotten what the quote said, after all we are dealing with 
memories?. Of course, that's true. He has ?forgotten? in the sense that he 
is, or she is, not reproducing that exact figure. But that creates an opening 
for telling another story also in terms of why is it that that fact gets 
recalled in a particular way. So that was very, very enabling for me, because 
I could then slash and cut whatever I had to tell in terms of the problems 
that the reader himself or herself had encountered at the end of a small 
chapter. So the question that then arose was anticipated, and would then be 
worked out in the next chapter. That's the way I did it.

And also purely stylistically I tried to make the book easy in the sense that 
-- and difficult at the same time -- because there's a lot of speech which is 
in a dialect, which an average Hindi reader will not fully understand. But 
there are no footnotes, I didn't want the readers' ascent to be a forward 
downward movement, ?Oh, which sentence did you got it from sort of thing?. ?. 
I put a lot of research back. If you don?t believe me, you know, spend some 
time and go through that. So I didn't want to have footnotes. I didn't want 
to have a glossary. And these are ways in which I felt I was trying to get 
the permission to narrate from the reader and go forward.

Top... 

alternative histories from within the discipline

The rest is a product of a first rate colonial archive in India, that exists 
and that the Brits created for us. Now I'm not joking. You need a tremendous 
amount of material to write. It's not just the will of the historian to write 
a new narrative, because that's the difference. There has to be that huge 
amount of stuff that you can now refigure and retell in new ways. There is no 
-- and that's why I'm talking about people writing alternative histories from 
within the discipline. You can write some very interesting things about the 
past. But that to my mind is not to do history. Not because it doesn't 
measure up to a kind of diplomatic notion of real truth but because you know, 
it is based on things which are not from the ?archive? in the proper sense of 
the term.

Top... 

oral evidence & the subaltern

Q Shahid, what is the status of oral evidence in relation to the subaltern? 
And related to that, how do you integrate oral sources into your written 
text?

Shahid: When I talked about everything is oral then I was referring to, to my 
mind one of the best historians of oral history, Alessandro Portelli, has got 
a book called The Death of Luigi Trastulli and other essays. Let me put it 
this way, before the historian reaches the historical event, which implicates 
peasants say, with the powers of the state. There already is a way in which 
testimony has been reworked by the judge or by the magistrate and so on. So 
that if that is the case, as I believe it to be, then I found it absolutely 
imperative for myself not to jump straight into the field without having 
mastered the archive. Because I could have said, ?well these guys might die, 
it will take me three years to get through all this documentation, let me 
first go and find out what they feel?. Because I think that is being 
dishonest as an historian. Because you're just turning up and you're not 
really implicating yourself, not purely morally but in terms of what you 
could really know for a dialogue to be established. It will just purely 
information gathering. ?All right, tell me what happened?? And you have no 
idea really what happened. So what sort of a dialogue are you going to have? 
So I wanted -- more so, as I said, since what they are going to remember is 
in terms of what was officially recorded as well. So that, so I had the field 
work right at the end. I tried to plough through the judicial evidence and so 
on and so forth. And then -- I'd not planned it like that. When I went to the 
villages, I realised that they were quite interested actually in the amount 
of information I already had on them. And the conversation then became a 
dialogue with all the differences that marked me from them. And therefore, I 
was not really producing a kind of oral history which gets produced because 
there's absence of record, you know. So that's first.

Top... 

history as dialogue

And that really also leads to the second question about how do you integrate 
oral history? It depends on the kind of question one is trying to address and 
write about. There might be instances where there are absolutely no written 
records, in which case I'll have to think about it in a new way. Or the term 
oral history itself might be too much of a blanket term. If I interview a 
performer and also record his songs, as I've done for the next project, is 
oral history a good enough term to encompass that. Though, you know, it is 
what I write as a historian will be a result of transcribing in what I hear. 
So these are some of the issues that I've tried to tackle in my book. And 
that's why I tried to write this term historical fieldwork. You know, it 
plays on this anthropological notion of fieldwork. But by historical I mean 
not just by a card-carrying historian, but fieldwork which is based on a 
dialogue which comes out of the historians marching outward from the archive. 
So I call it somewhere in the book ?a dialogue at the present site of past 
actions?. And I'm trying to play with this notion of dialogue so as to do 
away with, you know, people tell different stories to different people. Of 
course they do. And one way in which the dialogue of a historian gets useful 
for the historian is that it's not any elite knowing the dialect, talking to 
any peasant of the area about an event that many people remember differently. 
I do that to some extent. But you know, there are ways in which you narrow it 
down. I say somewhere in the book, you know, echoing Marx, that the 
subordinates make their own memories, but not as they please.



Discussion 2: Writing Alternative Histories
w/ Shahid Amin, Suvendrini Perera, Andrew Jakubowicz, Devleena Ghosh, Heather 
Goodall
?There?s no point going back to old certainties ? you have to do a new kind of 
history which gets into the question of memory, forgetfulness, constructions 
of the past, which are not the questions that proper historians anywhere had 
asked until very recently??.? Shahid Amin



Narrative and new media writing

Q In terms of the use of the multimedia form for the Shanghai project, how did 
the process come about? Was it informed as much by what goes on during your 
studies, or did you have a good idea at the beginning? Or did you have a good 
idea at the beginning?

Andrew: Well, what you saw there is just a PowerPoint, so it's just a sort of 
assembly of bits and pieces of stuff. The multimedia project itself went 
though a number of iterations and the critical thing was trying to find a 
metaphor to hold it together, so that we had a narrative structure that was 
both open enough to be accessible to a lot of different sorts of users, 
audiences, and theoretically sophisticated enough not to trivialise the whole 
thing. And there was a totally serendipitous element which was the discovery 
of the menorah. Because that gave us the metaphor. And what we've essentially 
done in structuring the web site is to raise the queries about how was it 
that this menorah came to be in Shanghai in the year 2000. And the opening, 
basically the opening sequence of the website is an entry into Shanghai 
through a spinning menorah. And it ends up with the menorah flickering and 
you can then run your cursor over the lights. And each light takes you into a 
different family. And each family is then evocative of one of those 
particular dimensions. And sitting behind the whole thing is a research 
database. So that database is actually a very rich source of additional 
material. So for instance, there's a map, a book map of Shanghai in the 
thirties, all those databases that we identified -- the Sukahara list, the 
Polish Consulate list, the Hong Qu police list, is all there. So for 
instance, if you actually wanted to go in and find out, you know, what the 
profile of Russians living in Hong Qu in 1943 looked like, you can go in 
either directly off the research front of it, or in through the Russian 
families.

Q: ? and for it being in a web form?

Andrew: The reason for it being on line is that you can just go in deeper and 
deeper and deeper. So in a number of cases, the families have given us access 
to photographic albums. And you can actually go into the photographic album 
and go through their memorabilia. There's a whole variety of stuff. So 
there's the actual photographs, then there's a whole series of artefacts and 
things. Documents, passes, stamps, letters, postcards, which together form 
both a research archive for people who want to know more about it, but also 
form elements in a narrative which sits at the front. So that's the idea. And 
because it's a website it's -- as I keep telling the designer I'm working 
with -- this is an unending opportunity, you know. You can retire on this.

Top... 

putting silence on the record

Q from Fiona Nicol: This is for the entire panel potentially. How do we put 
silence on the historical record, not as an absence or a gap to be filled, 
but how do we register the active silences? And also, how do we register in 
histories, different types or tones of voices? Like whingeing, or nagging?

Suvendrini: Maybe this is actually something I wanted to ask Devleena in terms 
of her work, so maybe this can come up with her. I was wondering about when 
you speak to people as an Indian from India, working on Fiji and talking to 
Fijian Indians, what are the politics of that, and are there ever refusals to 
speak or hesitations? Or do you feel that when people speak to you they edit 
what they're saying because you're an Indian from India? So I suppose how do 
you put silence on the register, I think that you have to respect also like 
silences that people want to keep. And this is something that I've only 
thought about today when Ann was talking about post-traumatic stress 
disorder, in terms of migrants. And this is something that I've written about 
actually, about migrants of say my mother's generation, who refuse to talk 
about certain experiences, and I think I've been guilty of misinterpreting 
this refusal sometimes, because I've written about it as a complicity with 
narratives of assimilation. And I've now been thinking about that, and 
perhaps it deserves a more complex treatment. So you know, that sort of 
silence can be also refusal and a very powerful form of speech.

Devleena: Yes, I have actually done some work on this issue of my own position 
in this project. And to say of course that being an Indian from India both 
gives me some -- a leeway, it gives me a foothold. And because I can 
understand Fiji Hindi, it enables me also to speak in that. But of course it 
also sort of places me in a particular way. And in some ways it gives me some 
advantages that say a total non-Indian -- I mean however you would put it -- 
would have. And some disadvantages that a total non-Indian would not have.

Because I think in the paper that was in the reader, some of these issues come 
up. Because the conflicts between the south Asian Indian and the indo-Fijian 
communities, I mention over there. You know, the issues around authenticity, 
legitimacy, a whole range of issues to do with sort of background and caste 
and of religion. So that places me also in a certain way. But what I actually 
found was, not only the editing and the silence, which of course happens, but 
also kind of mediation. So when I would speak to people, they would often say 
something to somebody else to tell me. So that in a sense that issue of I 
suppose whether you'd call it trust or whatever, I mean they can trust their 
friends to tell me something, or whoever it is they choose, whether it's a 
relative or so on, that mediated experience, which would come to me from 
somebody else who is seen as a friend of mine and could be trusted by that 
person. You know, so that I would not make the mistake that I might make by 
connecting with them directly in some ways. So that was one of the ways, 
especially with older people, that was very much a way in which they related 
to me.

And secondly, yes, there were a lot of silences. I mean there were a lot of 
silences, for example, around all sorts of issues about sexuality, especially 
in relation to the Fijian community, where basically it was a way of 
retaining a certain level of sort of autonomy and a certain level of 
independence, which I completely respected. I think that my position as an 
Indian from India has really been complicated and difficult. It's also been 
very rewarding, because in a sense it's enabled spaces to open up that would 
not have otherwise opened up. And it's also closed off spaces, which perhaps 
would not have been closed. But you know, I just work with that.

Top... 

fragile interview dialogue

Shahid: I guess I could begin by rephrasing that question slightly, and say, 
you know, when does the outsider, the historian, the investigator, decide to 
deny herself or himself the opportunity to ask another question. I think 
that's the other side of what you're asking us. Because these are very -- and 
that takes me to the idea that I was trying to suggest of a dialogue -- that 
without the other person being silent, the dialogue which is going on gives 
you the signal, that you refuse then to ask a question that might produce a 
silence. And I have -- because so that you realise that incidentally, without 
it having been narrativised, something has been said which, if you broach it 
further, would then amount to asking a question which you would not like 
somebody else to ask of you. So I think at several places I, when I was 
interviewing for my book, I had the ?risk? of not getting more information, I 
decided not to ask the next question, precisely because I'd got some hint of 
an information which was otherwise very important to me, which I could build 
on, but a further asking of a question would have then led to the end of that 
conversation or dialogue. So that it's a much more fragile relationship where 
the dialogue is very important. It's not you pressing, and silence then being 
the result, but you being yourself silenced. I think that is what field 
workers and people who interview should also consider, because that's only 
then that the basic asymmetry that exists in any kind of interview is then 
rewardingly calibrated. Where you recognise, just as you recognise as a 
historian, that the archives are not created for you, that there are gaps 
that you can't do anything about, just because the other person is in flesh 
and blood, you can't squeeze the last bit of information, because after all, 
what you're doing is not interviewing in a purely fact finding thing, you are 
creating a dialogue. That's what I found, and there are many indicators that 
I tried to give of this in my book. I even narrativise it and then when this 
woman says this, I say, and then I could hear the historian mumbling, 'What 
else do I ask?' Because actually I do that on the tape. And because she says, 
'What else can I tell you?' saying that look -- and she said 'How much more 
can I narrate?' And I say, 'Well, what do I ask her?' That's my silenced 
being verbalised. That's what I take that question to be.

Andrew: There's a book that a colleague of mine, a linguist, has just 
published, called Silence, published by Allen & Unwin, and it's an 
exploration with a group of children of not only, but mainly children of 
holocaust survivors, about how their parents told them about what happened. 
And it's a very evocative account of the many different ways silence exists 
in relationships. And I found it very, very interesting, because it's -- 
there's all those sorts of things that people have talked about, but then 
there's the silence of spaces that are just out of bounds. There's the 
silence of I want you to push harder. You have to push harder, because unless 
you push harder I don't believe you really care. There's the silences of this 
is too painful, we don't want to go there. There's the silence of ?I tried to 
speak this 50 years ago and nobody would listen, why are you asking now?? So 
there's all sorts of elements to that. And I found that an extremely 
interesting book.The final chapter actually deals with a whole series of 
people whose parents had various traumatic or strange things happening and 
about how they had conversations with them over the years.

Devleena: I was just going to say one last thing, and this reminded me of just 
one little family history thing, which is when my father died a few years 
ago, we found amongst his papers an advertisement looking for a Burmese 
woman. Our father had been in Rangoon during the war and had escaped 
overland, you know, when the Japanese came in. And what was of interest to me 
is not only his completely silence; we don't know who this Burmese woman was, 
whether it was, you know, a daughter, a lover, a wife. I mean there's no 
indication. But his complete silence about this person who had been so 
important that he had, for three years, constantly put these advertisements, 
you know, every month in the paper. It was quite expensive, and he didn't 
have much money. But I think Fiona, what your question reminded me of, is 
what we really wanted to know is did our mother know? How do we ask our 
mother whether she knew about this woman? How do we ask our mother, who is 
this woman? Is it a daughter, a lover, a wife. And we, all of us sisters, you 
know, skated around the question trying to find ways to ask our mother 
without asking her. And it was a really fascinating exercise, which just 
really picks up on what Shahid is saying about, you know, how do you ask the 
question that you can't actually ask. And I think that's with the indo-Fijian 
community, I think that comes up again and again -- how do you ask the 
question that you can't really ask? And I still don't know who the Burmese 
woman was. Probably never find out.

Top... 

silences and public responsibilities

Heather: There's been quite a lot of work on people remembering trauma, for 
example, and memory. Like Louisa Passerini, thinking about the memories of 
Italians about their experience under fascism. And there are things which 
become apparent when you interview a number of people, that there are 
patterns of silences, and her work is largely about an exploration of why it 
was that Italian workers were silenced about fascism. This was a situation in 
which many workers who had strong political convictions against fascism were 
unable to come to terms with their own complicity or their own need to take 
part in a state and a set of labour relations which were organised under 
fascism. So it was simply too difficult to narrate that story, and so it is 
just left out of people's otherwise chronological accounts of their life 
stories. And there's some very interesting work also from Nazi Germany as 
well. As well as in relation to indigenous people and memory.

The point I wanted to raise was that -- in those personal relationships which 
are often really challenging, where you are speaking with someone about their 
memories, you have to make those decisions that Shahid has talked about at 
various points. But overall, this raises, I think, a question about the 
responsibilities of the historian or the analyst, whatever label you use, as 
a public intellectual, as an actor in the public arena. Because many of these 
silences as Suvendi has suggested allow a dominant narrative which is in 
contradiction to continue to circulate, as if it were unchallenged. So what 
role does the analyst have, having recognised that area of silence? This is 
not about pursuing people's memories which they don't wish to speak about, or 
about revealing individual memories, or pressuring people, but it's a 
question of the responsibility to indicate and express and perhaps explain or 
speculate about -- certainly indicate the presence of that silence, and ask 
in general, ask the public sphere, why that silence is there, and explore the 
reasons. And it seems to me that that's one of the other ways in which the 
issue that Shahid has raised, about the responsibilities of analysts or 
historians to take an active role. It is not only our role to facilitate the 
expression of individual testimony, we've also got a job which is analysis, 
which requires intense thought about the way people tell their stories, not 
just the detailed content -- and silence is very much a part of the way 
people tell their stories.

Top... 

writing questions into the telling

Shahid: I just wanted to share with you and others that I revised my 
manuscript, which I actually finished in Berlin, with Louisa Passerini as a 
fellow of the same institution and I actually wrote a chapter which I've 
called ?Towards Conclusion?, precisely to answer all the queries that she had 
to put to the manuscript. So that there was a way in which after I thought 
I'd finished and I had given this to a non-Indian reader, the questions that 
she asked, I thought I'll not put it as conclusion, but ?towards conclusion?. 
So I just wanted to share that with you, and also to thank you all for giving 
me this opportunity of presenting whatever I have from my very specialised 
reading of a very specialised set of events to audiences which are not Indian 
so as to take on their questions as a part of my story. So that's another bit 
of juggling that I do. That what I then write I make questions arise out of 
my own telling which are really other people's questions that were posed to 
me as questions coming from the outside, which I then incorporate as if they 
are emerging from within my own text, which hopefully then makes the text 
easily, slightly more easier for those same people, or other people to read. 
So I just wanted to share that with you.

Top... 

secular/sectarian/multicultural

Q I was interested in something that Shahid said, and I think it may tie up 
with the Australian situation. You talk about two strands in the Indian 
historiography ? One was the secular national and one was the sectarian 
Hindi. And one was based loosely on based homogeneity, and the other one 
based on conflict and blaming the other ? ? [inaudible] .. And I?d like to 
suggest that there may be a broad tie-up with the Australian context of 
multiculturalism on the one side, which is part of, sort of a new nationalism 
which is a consensual, harmonious sort of idea of ethnic relations within the 
country ? and Hanson?s which is exclusionist and based on racial analysis. A 
couple of questions there. One is the sectarian .. whether it predates the 
19th century type of essentialism which you mentioned, the Hindu nationalist 
idea of the Hindu as the ?natural? citizen of India. And if you translate 
that to Australia, who?s the ?natural? citizen of Australia? ? And then 
secondly, If you accept difference with the present, how do you relate 
politics of the past ?.. and can we go past the consensual view of the past? 
Because this debate exists in Australia and obviously it exists in India?

Shahid: It doesn't exist in historiography because the standard response of 
the secular nationalists is, ?they were not the kind of people that we are?. 
In fact that ?we have nothing to do with them?. While, you know, in a way the 
Hindu sectarian will say, ?Shahid Amin, that's your name. Your name speaks 
your history?. And I'll say, ?am I that name?? shall I say. So, you know, but 
yeah, I really appreciate what you say. And that's why when I was reading the 
last portion I qualified it by saying I really don't know how this will work 
out in Australia. When you talk about ?who is the natural citizen here?? It's 
quite clear who the original inhabitants -- even if they're not property 
owners -- are. But who the natural citizens of the nation state, you can be a 
citizen only of a nation state. You can't be a citizen of a space. So that I 
think -- correct me if I'm wrong -- that one would have to begin with the 
notion of whiteness and it?s tie up with the idea of a national citizenry in 
Australia and see how one complicates that, I guess.

Suvendrini: Well, the obvious thing that when we were federated, when 
Australia federated in 1901, the indigenous inhabitants of this country were 
included by exclusion in the constitution of 1901. So those questions of 
citizenship and the native, who's the native, who's the alien, all those 
things are very complicated. I just have a question about whether we can 
actually, whether that narrative of the sectarian and the secular, can 
actually be productively for us translated into this opposition between the 
Hansonist and what you call the consensual multiculturalist. And I would say 
no, because I can see a lot of -- I'm going to get into big trouble now -- 
but I can see a lot of points of convergence between the official narrative 
of multiculturalism, which I see as a continuation rather than a rupture from 
assimilation, and the sort of assimilationism of Hansonism. So I'm sort of at 
a loss about doing that translation.

Shahid: You say that quite clearly in one of your articles.

Q In a sense it does relate to the issue that Shahid described, the same 
problems with the idea of national unity and of secular unity post-47 in 
India.. That simplified notion of inclusiveness is the same.. the problems 
with both are the same..

Shahid: Yes, so I am really saying that this kind of a view, the sectarian 
Hindu nationalism doesn't arise suddenly from nowhere in the 1980s. It was a 
moving of a fringe that was always there into the centre, from the margin to 
the centre of the political discourse. So that's always there, as even 
something that's part of a cultural base, or natural base, of nationalism as 
well to some extent.

Andrew: I don't know if I necessarily agree with Suvendi's reading of 
multiculturalism. I think I'd agree that the current -- the so called 
Australian multiculturalism, which is the contemporary government ideology, 
definitely fits within a sort of developmental trajectory from the 
assimilationist White Australia period, because it's still very heavily based 
around notions of core values, which are fairly much unchanged. You know, so 
you can be any colour you like, as long as your values are Australian. And 
then you unpack what that might mean, etcetera. And it leaves totally 
untested the issue of the place of indigenous people in the Australian value 
structures. But I think that the issue about where the fault lines run in 
Australian consciousness are actually much more difficult to unpack than they 
might be in an environment where you have two blocks in a sense with long 
histories of confrontation. That the Australian, that the, if you like, the 
colonial settler society in Australia is still very early and fragile as an 
imposition on the landscape compared with I think the history of a country 
like India, which goes back solidly into the sort of heart rock of the 
country for so many, well thousands of years. And I think that issue is a 
really interesting one.

And I'm reminded of it -- I remember once talking to an Indonesian scholar, we 
were debating issues about whether you could compare Australia and Indonesia. 
And he said, well initially he thought not, but then he thought well actually 
if you think of all societies as being essentially entropic. That is, that 
all societies have a tendency to fragment and dissolve and energy has to be 
put in, cultural energy has to be constantly invested in maintaining whatever 
it is, or sustaining or changing, then the issue fundamentally is who gets to 
write the scripts about where the energy is going to go? And I think the 
Australian contest is actually not as clearly cut as one might like. Again, I 
don't necessarily agree with someone like Ghassan Hage about the notion of 
whiteness per se, particularly having started work on the Chinese, on work in 
China, the notion of the Han Chinese as a sort of factional, fictional 
factional creation, which is far more impelling and far more, far less 
self-consciously self questioning than whiteness in Australia, actually 
raises for me some really quite significant questions about how useful the 
simple dichotomies in Australian models are.

Top... 

the recalcitrant event

Q Shahid, I wanted to say how useful your notion of alternative history has 
been for me ? I?m presently studying the alternative media of Central 
American liberation studies. I suppose you'd call it the guerilla media 
systems of El Salvador and Nicaragua. And your notion -- well especially your 
session this morning with the warrior martyr, triggered off my thoughts about 
the Nicaraguan experience where the figure of Sandino, who gave his name to 
the Sandinista revolution, it was really -- he was written out of Nicaraguan 
history given the time of the Somoza dynasty. When the Nicaraguans have 
started remembering why he was forgotten it created a consciousness, a nexus 
of consciousness I suppose, around which the movement was mobilised. And 
interestingly enough, when I left Nicaragua in 1990, the process of writing 
him out of history again had begun. The murals, the graffiti, everything. It 
was the first thing the new government did was to erase; burn the textbooks, 
the whole thing. And I've just read a paper where someone who's been there 
recently said it's almost totally erased. Now my question is when these 
historical contradictions or disjunctions or polarities or recalcitrant 
events arise -- I think my example of Nicaragua's probably an example of a 
conflictive history -- once identified, what happens to it? What do we do 
with it? What does an historian do with it? And there's another question 
spinning off from that, but I'd be happy if you could just answer that one.

Shahid: Let me try a response along the following lines. And before that, a 
little prologue from a historian's tale. Not the clerk's tale. I was 
absolutely centrally influenced in working this problem about the warrior 
saint by my reading of the Spanish conquest of Latin America, which I read 
some early articles by Nathan Wachtel which became the book called The Vision 
of the Vanquished, which gave me some idea also about how relationships are 
worked out in performative arts with the conquistadors and the murders in 
Peru and Mexico. But that's just an aside. But let me just open up the 
question a little bit by saying that -- and correct me if I'm latching on to 
one word wrongly -- when these events are identified. I think it is not a 
case of our going and discovering something that was not there. But calling 
something that was not called an event, an event. You know, what I mean by 
that is that -- abbreviating the Azimer personality in terms purely of the 
cult. And saying, ?well the cult is real, the person didn't exist. So we 
can't handle that?. So what I'm going to suggest is that the identification 
from the point, exists from the point of view of the historian. In saying, 
?look, what is not seen as an event ?.. ? so Azimir's life could be seen as a 
non-event, inasmuch as you emphasise only the miraculous powers that his 
shrine has, because of his untimely death. You can create a completely 
historical non-matheological (?) historical scenario saying, you know, Muslim 
Sufis had miraculous powers. This is a great local guy we have got. So many 
people have been going to his shrine from the time of Imnabatu time, 1351, 
let's now write a history of this shrine. And what it has meant to millions 
of people who have come over here. So you know, I'm not discovering this guy. 
I have not manufactured this guy in a Subaltern Studies history workshop. 
This guy has been staring everybody in the face, the dead face of his, for 
five hundred years. There's a separate railway station for pilgrims to get 
off. There's a special police posse, there is a separate magistrate who was 
brought into being when the fair takes place. It's just that his life is not 
seen as an event in the history of India, because that history is peopled by 
real characters.

So you know, in a kind of a response to you, what we do really, what a 
historian does is not to identify an event and then do something about it, 
but to discover something as an event which could not be written because, if 
it gets written as an event, then it would do something else to many other 
events, or other things. And say that, ?well, this is an event in a very 
special sense of the term??, especially in this case, with a guy who doesn't 
exist, is really eventful, because what is important about the event is how, 
from the 14th century, people have created this character, this life, to 
reflect on very momentous events with whom he is associated. Right? So that's 
the take I am trying to suggest. And -- have I unfairly latched onto your 
word identify? But you know, it helped me to suggest what I'm -- so it's not 
-- I then discover an unknown guy and say ?look, this is the most important 
chap nobody has ever heard of?. So this is the complete, you know, autonomous 
realm where people have made their own sense of Turkish conquest and not told 
anybody about it. And the historian then, through perseverance, discovers 
this nugget and said, ?look, nobody knew, I've got a big grant and I've got 
this event out. Now this is the most important event?. With my book on Chauri 
Chaura also, I said ?look, let's find out why nobody else has written on 
this? Everybody knows about it. Definitely in one way or the other. But why 
aren't people taking this as an event??

Top... 

engaging history in the political contest

Q But something similar happened in Australia with our Aboriginal history. I?m 
not a historian so I might be out of my depth here, but I think it was barely 
studied. I think Manning Clark was probably the first historian who actually 
started to look at it any way? I know he didn't do it very much? But this 
actually leads me to my second question, you know. The public discussion of 
this. The debate on our various, our I suppose polarised histories, the 
polarised history of Australia, with Aboriginal Australia, which is fuelling 
a lot of public debate at the moment. And in fact, historians have played a 
part in this in fuelling this debate. The whole concept of the black armband 
view of history much touted around by a lot of politicians, which I think was 
originated by Geoffrey Blainey, and that sort of opened up out the debate. So 
I guess the second question is the historian as public intellectual or public 
figure.

Shahid: I guess, as I said, what really propelled me into this sort of history 
of memory and remembrance and so on, was -- and I was discussing with a few 
people over coffee -- is that along with the rise of this Hindu majoritarian 
movement, which claimed a certain sanctity for a particular kind of action in 
the present, on the base of a particular construction of history, where 
history was invoked, the professional historian was being marginalised. And 
that was also done systematically, because it was not necessarily that a 
political party was now giving political expression to a major 
historiographical trend. And say ?once we come to power, we'll put this guy's 
history into practice?. Coming to power and creating a new history by the 
political party were a simultaneous process, and history as it was 
institutionalised in India was associated with kind of a deracinated western 
secular Marxist kind of history, so we had to necessarily bring down the 
intellectual capital of all professional historians. The moment you created 
this instant history, written by non-historians, which was very positivistic, 
but on the other hand, totally enmeshed in ?This is my belief and this is the 
land of India, of Hindus and Hindu beliefs should count. Now this belief is 
history and this should count?.

So precisely when history was invoked the historian as a professional was 
being marginalised. And that's what made me intervene and suggest that this 
rallying cry of ?Let's all like-minded historians get together!? and ?One 
more push for scientific social history and these cobwebs would go away!? I 
thought this will not do, because as I tried to say in the beginning of that 
paper On Remembering the Musalman, what historians, or professional 
historians, had not done, was to try and write histories of how memories and 
communities are intermixed. I forget the beautiful lines that Suvendrini 
quoted. That communities and histories come together or something like that.

Top... 

creating a new history

So my earlier pieces were really stemmed, in 1986? from this. But that move 
was a challenging move, because that also meant convincing the professions 
that what is needed is another kind of history which is still history. 
Because the secular hardliners would say, ?look, if you let go of facticity, 
of positivist Marxism and so on and so forth, you are going to cross into 
their courtyard?. And I would say, well, but how can you fight them unless 
you take the fight into their courtyard and the metaphor that in India I've 
often given, is the boxing ring. And if you're keeping your punching in your 
corner, you're not going to get the guy. You have to, as they say, come out 
and, as they say, fight. So you have to really come to that ground. And punch 
harder and better. And -- which would also mean that you have to also 
convince the other people on your side that you are doing something new, 
because that's what they have not been able to do, but yet, it is history, 
because that's how -- it's like a new, it's like the Colgate Dental Ring that 
gives you 12 hour protection, right. In the sense that it's something new, 
but it comes out of something that is the usual. But this is something that 
you are able to do better. So that there's no point going back to old 
certainties. You have to do history, but you have to do a new kind of history 
which then gets into the question of memory, forgetfulness, constructions of 
past and so on, which are not the questions that proper historians anywhere 
had asked until very recently, or were cagey to ask, because they thought to 
ask these questions is to -- as somebody asked yesterday -- is to really pull 
the ground from under the edifice of proper history itself.

Top... 

impact in the present

Q I'm not sure that you haven't already partly addressed some of the things 
that came up in the question that our group discussed, which came out of 
discussing ways in which the past lives on in the present. And with very 
specific reference to the real context in India in the present. We wanted to 
know what effects you thought this story of yours from the past and your 
refashioning of the Warrior Saint, will actually have in the present in 
India.

Shahid: Well, as some friends, comrades would think that I should not be doing 
this kind of history. Nobody has written about it, why do you want to do it 
now? Because some people might utilise this sort of thing to perhaps to have 
a movement and you attack the shrine or something like that. I am conscious 
of that, but you know -- and I'm also conscious of the fact that in certain 
senses local constructions or even regional constructions can be hijacked, by 
people who use a particular site to construct a pan-Indian view of things, as 
has happened in the past. I refer to the way in which, in the late 19th 
century, certain Hindi writers hijacked local events about matrimonial 
alliances and fitted it into a certain notion of India's past. But I guess 
what I'm saying is that one, that given the way non-professional histories 
are being fabricated in the interest of a particular majoritarian view of 
India's past, we should as professional historians, really create histories 
which are already in the market or on the ground, before a very positivist 
kind of a pop Hindu chauvinist history is created. And then you all scurry 
back and we then mount a defence or write a critical review of this really 
bad book on Wazimir [?], which would be written by an ideologue, or a World 
Bank returned economist who is now a member of the Cabinet, and who 
specialises in writing 600 page books on everything. Avin Surey (??) who did 
economics in the same college as I did history from.

So then, so that, you know, so we must do this, otherwise it might be done in 
a non-professional way and a much more emotive way by somebody else. So that 
the professional historians would always be reacting.

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popular culture, history and the warrior saint

Secondly, and I think I've already said this, I'm amazed how the professional 
historians who are otherwise interested in popular culture and so on and so 
forth, can ignore something that is so much a part of the popular culture of 
this region for the past 500 years, including today. So that you know, if 
there are problems that the local chauvinists have thought about, they have 
thought about it for the past 70 years. There have been attempts since the 
1910s by the local Hindu Arissamas(??), especially of this district. What 
good are you as a major Hindu figure of Behright(?) if you don't rebut their 
story. And there have been any number of pamphlets which have come up in the 
past from the 1910s which say ?well, these Bannadiers(??) are real 
scoundrels?, meaning they have cooked up these stories. But they don't say, 
that well, ?this hagiography?s a hagiography. Who was this guy? He didn't 
exist, so why bother about him?. They really converge hagiography into 
history ?This is what happened!? and then they advise Hindus to read this 
history properly, in terms of what we already know, what we already remember 
about the Musalman. So that there is for the past 80 years, an attempt 
independently of my first discovery of Wazimir [?] in 1980, to bring this guy 
down in the area in the province. And if that movement succeeds, I think it 
would succeed independently of whatever subversive or incendiary effect my 
little book will have on these people.

You know, so that again, I'm not really addressing this book as with my Chauri 
Chaura book, to the actual devotees, on either side of the divide -- those 
who are really upset with the Hindu wives going to this guy, or those who go 
to the shrine. I talked to them: they are my major material, but this is 
really an intervention in the sphere of the non-devotees. And I think that 
the fact that this cult has existed for 500 years and has survived the 
attacks with print capitalism and so on, on it for the past 80 years -- even 
today at the big fair there is a stall put up the RSMI(??), who sell their 
history of Hindus and Wazimir every year. I bought some of them over there. 
So there is -- what I'm saying is that there is enough attempt to counter it, 
tension and survival, independently of my intervention. And I think that it 
would be fruitless on my part to only think well, they'll read this book in 
New Delhi and then launch a campaign on this. If it comes to that, then that 
would be really sad, that what I write as a historian becomes the occasion 
for a major political attack on this person, while at the local level and the 
provincial level, in fact the cult has been there surviving and existing 
because of this attack for so long.

Let me just point out, you know, it's not that every guy who comes there is 
made to kneel and accept that ?Look, you have come to worship at the shrine 
of this guy who killed so many people?. There's a tension over there. I mean 
nobody's forced to admit. And the cult is able to survive precisely that. 
Neither is this guy made into a complete Hindu god, right. Doing only cows 
and nothing else. Nor is this guy written totally in terms of an Islamic 
hero. And it is the tension between the two that creates the space for all 
sorts of ideas in the same head, leading towards the movement towards this 
guy. And in effect, repeated attempts, several attempts to clarify the mind, 
clear the mind, have failed, and so that way I feel that it's not that 
dangerous. It would be overestimating my particular role as a public 
intellectual. That's how I think.

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rethinking diaspora

Q I'm particularly interested -- Devleena you mentioned the idea of the 
diaspora? I'm also interested in hearing a little bit from yourself? how do 
you use the concept of diaspora, and what are the problems with writing 
histories of diasporas? particularly if you are on the periphery of the 
diaspora?

Suvendrini: That's a really interesting question to ask a Sri Lankan, because 
when you say if you're on the periphery of a diaspora, I mean in one of the 
biggest debates for us, for Sri Lankans is are you part of the Indian 
diaspora. [laughter] And -- which is a really sort of complicated question. 
And then you know, the Sri Lankan diaspora and the sort of complications of 
that. And so there are obviously huge problems and debates about all of that, 
which I acknowledge in a way, but I'm not particularly interested in buying 
into because they don't seem to be important to what I want to look at. So I 
wouldn't position myself in that way as someone who writes about diaspora. 
I'm not really trying to dodge the question, it's just that that's not where 
I would locate myself. I would see myself as writing about migration, which 
is slightly different. And also as writing, you know, what I've called 
somewhat -- you know, people are asking me about this -- why I use the term 
multi racial and multi ethnic, rather than multiculturalism. But I don't 
really -- I don't locate myself within that diasporic tradition.

Devleena: Yeah, Suvendrini's stolen my thunder, because I was going to say, I 
actually think I write history of migrants, which I was going to say when you 
said it. But I suppose the problem -- certainly for India, in which I don't 
include Sri Lanka, I'll try not too -- there's a whole sort of range of 
questions about the notion of South Asia in the diaspora. And looking just at 
the Indian diaspora, if you want to use that word, in Australia for example, 
I mean leaving the Indo-Fijians out of it for the moment, to a large extent 
--the way that they, the way that the Indian diaspora seems to sort of work, 
is in a sense much more regionalised, certainly in Australia. So there's 
Bengali associations and Tamil associations, and even I think a Telugu 
association. And there's even a Vishuwa Hindi Parishad. So in a sense, they 
might come together for certain things, like when a film star comes from 
India, then everybody and his dog turns up, and her cat or whatever. But the 
thing is, in terms of actual inter-dining, inter-socialising, inter, you 
know, whatever you want to call it, it's much more. So then do we say, is 
there a Bengali diaspora? Is there a Calcutta diaspora? I mean it just gets 
into this kind of mess, really. So I try and keep out of the mess and just 
sort of work around the edges and just say well, migrants, I'm talking about 
migrants, and they come from certain parts of India, or Bangladesh sometimes, 
or whatever. So I don't know if I answered your question, but it's probably 
because I don't know the answer.

Q In relationship to the jewish diaspora ?. what is that the relationship of 
homeland to the diaspora in your situation?

Andrew: Yeah, well I was about to say, the Jewish diaspora, you mean the 
Jewish diasporas, right, because you know, five Jews, six presidents. I think 
the value of diaspora as a concept is actually primarily with those peoples 
who don't have a homeland in which they control a nation state. Because it 
sort of sets the political context rather more effectively. ? In the context 
of the Jewish diaspora, I think it's a really interesting problematic term, 
because it implies a whole series of things about the role that Israel plays 
in notions of Judaism. And that's a political question around which there are 
huge arguments, amongst Jews, let alone amongst everybody else. And that 
analytically I think though diaspora really has its initial linkage to ideas 
of the Jewish diaspora, it was more relevant to a period before the 
establishment of the state of Israel, where there were enormous questions 
about what it means to have -- what a Jewish home is, right? Is it -- prior 
to the Second World War, some people were fairly comfortable about the notion 
of Judaism as a religion, as other religions, and you were a citizen of the 
nation state, and therefore that was it. But over the last hundred years with 
the growth of political Zionism in its various forms, again diaspora then 
takes on a particular political tone, which has as one of its solutions to 
the diasporic problem, is the establishment of the state of Israel, which has 
all sorts of other questions.

Top... 

truth, cultural experience and representing the ?other?

Q This is a question for Andrew. I was thinking a lot about your 
representation of China in your project, and I guess I'm interested in the 
fact that you seem to -- and I might be wrong of course -- you seem to 
concentrate on a national discourse of China and relationship to Jewish in a 
particular period. But when you then describe what was going to happen with 
your website, you are very clear about representing differences within the 
Jewish community that end up, for some reason or another, in China. And I 
guess I'm a bit concerned about the fact that China is just represented in 
one way, which is a national dominant way.

Andrew: Yeah, I skated over that question. I thought I made some reference to 
it. The ideology of pan-Hanism as an ideology of China making is, I think, a 
really important issue. Because China as a single concept is very much an 
ideological thing generated out of a particular political trajectory. And 
that the energy put into holding China together, as we know, is enormous. I 
mean the political, cultural energy that goes in on a daily basis to 
reproducing the notion of China in the modern PRC, whether it's talking about 
the destruction of the Falun Gong, the confrontation with Taiwan, the debate 
over the role of Mandarin as the national language, how they deal with 
minorities ? so-called minorities -- what to do about the Manchurian history, 
or the Manchu history of the Han empires. All those things are highly 
problematic elements I think. And I wouldn't want you to think I was unaware 
of that. But I think one of the interesting questions we've asked a lot of 
the people in the research is, thinking back, how would you summarise your 
experience of what it was like -- or how would you summarise your experience 
of China, leaving it as open as possible. And what you tend to get are these 
extraordinarily different projections, which are essentially relational 
projections. So some people say, I lived there for 50 years and I regret 
never getting to know China. Others said it was an extraordinarily affluent 
and spoilt life. It could never have happened in another time or place. 
Others would say, one guy said, I left there when I was 14, but as a child 
and an adolescent, those years were the most extraordinary of my life. It was 
like a magic land at the end of the rainbow. And others said it was the most 
horrific time -- it really depends. But each of them has a particular China 
that they related to.

And this comes back to the question of what is the truth of any cultural 
experience. I mean the truth is all those truths. They are each true in terms 
of the experience of the people concerned. And the issue I guess in 
interviewing is to try and sense how much the individual is drawing on this 
notion of a panoramic external history to draw on an reinterpret their own 
experience. And how much they're simply lying about what happened. One 
particular guy who's now extremely wealthy, and a really nice guy, and the 
interview that he gave, he was particularly concerned to put to sleep two 
myths that he was concerned about in the community that he was in. One was 
that the white Russians, the tsarist Russians in China, were extremely 
anti-Semitic. And he describes in quite elaborate detail, how one of the 
leading Russian fascists actually helped him escape. And he then tells 
another [similar] story about being in Shanghai and gives quite a detailed 
history of the time in Shanghai. And in another interview with somebody else, 
who knew him well, she said 'Oh, did he tell you about the time he was in 
gaol?' No. Never mentioned it. It was part of his narrative at all. But it 
was very much part of her narrative about him.

So there are all these questions -- there are all these questions about how 
you actually pin things down and try and tell a story. And I guess, taking up 
Shahid's point, a lot of what you're trying to do is actually evoke a respect 
for a multitude of alternalities about what goes. So that you're not stuck 
with a particular fixed statement about this is what life, this is what it 
was really like. And one of the experiences that a lot of people researching 
in this area have had is when they get a group, for instance, of 
Shanghailanders together, they have enormous arguments the moment they get 
together. 'No, it wasn't like that, it was like this.' 'It might have been 
like that for you, but it was like this for me.' And you get this 
extraordinary dynamic where people are absolutely convinced of the reality of 
their own history, obviously. But are very aggressive about anyone else's 
history, which might suggest that their's is anything but true and valid.

Heather: I'd like to say on behalf of Transforming Cultures at UTS, and of the 
Institute for Cultural Research at UTS and UWS, it's been an incredibly 
valuable two days?Thank you to you all.

Top... 

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