On History

Due to two important reasons that I thought I should write a little piece on HISTORY as the Keyword of this week. The first reason for me to get ‘back to history’ (or rather get ‘history back’ to me) relates with the longstanding indulgence that I have had on this subject. I have been a continued fan of reading history as an inherent part of social and political developments of the world and therefore, it was one of the favorite areas of study for me apart from my studies at the department of Philosophy since my undergraduate years up to now.

Further, it is also a known fact that we had a best group of academics on South Asian History at Peradeniya at that time. It is important to note here that most of them were not just academics who were keen about their promotions and salaries, they were very influential people in sociopolitical thinking of the country. Moreover, they had been taking critical positions on the socio-political debate in the country at that time. If we barrow a term from Gramsci, they were kind of ‘organic intellectuals’ related to different social forces to which they were attached. So, politically motivated students like me was always welcomed by some of these senior staff members at the department of History and, I would like to note that friendship in turn has sharpened my interest towards this discipline.

Second reason that I thought to write on History was due to the timely importance of the subject in our society today.  We are a country, which has an ongoing conflict over our past.

And, it is correct to say that the part of the practical or political disparities that we experience in our daily life is linked to the way we read our past. In other words, we could say that in the Sri Lankan context, history has been a weapon of the conflict even at the time that the conflict is not in a visible form. So it is important to examine what does it mean to us and how this keyword has been used in our time.

Dr. Charitha Herath

Senior Lecturer at the University of Peradeniya

Writer can be reached via charith9@yahoo.com

Though many scholars have given different meanings for the word HISTORY, it is important to note that the ambiguity and the vagueness were also high on the agreement on those meanings. In a nutshell, mainstream Victorian way of studying history shows that it is a phenomenon, aiming to search a ‘real’ something in the past and to develop a discourse on that ‘reality’. As Edward Soja critiques in his Postmodern Geographies the Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, historical imagination based only on one dimensional manner, such as historical narrating only based on temporal (Time) resources; would leave us out from “contextualized yet critical interpretation of social life and practices” of a given condition. Though Classical Marxist interpretations on the subject has suggested a material concept of history based on social facts derived from socio-economic conditions, the challenges which came from philosophical schools in postmodern era still remains unanswered.  One of the Sri Lankan study on the subject by PVJ Jayasekera under the name of Confrontations with Colonialism deals with some of the postmodernist and post colonialist argument of the relationship between power, knowledge and history.

It seems that the subject of historiography in post-colonial Sri Lanka has been dominated by the colonial influence in many ways. There are two out of those many influences that we could highlight here. Firstly, our historiography has been highly backed by methodologies that the colonial power has introduced. Secondly, the conceptual direction suggested by Sri Lankan historiography mainly bases on anti-colonial directions. This binary opposite kind of engagements in the works on history in the post-colonial Sri Lanka makes number of unresolved issues.

Opposite to the Sri Lankan experience, Indian academic enterprise shows us an alternative approach to both Victorian (main stream positivistic) way of doing historiography and to the classical Marxist approach on history as well. In an interesting introductory piece under the name of A Small History if Subaltern Studies, Depesh Chakrabarty argues that the Subaltern Studies project in India emerged to address one of the substantive issues in writing history in post-colonial India. The main issue, Chakrabarty says, was to develop a critical observation on both colonization and on the nationalism project in India and to go beyond ‘Cambridge thesis propounding a skeptical view of Indian nationalism and Marxist thesis assimilating to a nationalistic historiographic agenda’. He further argues that the main examination of subaltern project was to see the ‘real conflicts of ideas and interest between the elite nationalists and their socially subordinate followers’.

As I mentioned above, it seems that very limited attempts were taken in developing such navel critical approach in the process of Sri Lankan historiography.  More particularly, it is obvious that less attention was given to the colonial and post-colonial historiographic project in Sri Lankan intellectual debates in history.

With this note it is important to see the development of the word history as a keyword in the 19^th and 20^th century academic discussions. Raymond Williams Keywords (1983) presents three different ways that the word Historicism is used. “(1) natural – a method of studying using facts from the past to trace the current events (2) deliberate – an emphasis on variable historical conditions and contexts as a privileged framework for interpreting all specific events; (3) hostile – an attack on all interpretation and prediction which is based on notions of historical necessity or general laws of historical development”.

I would like to continue this topic in my column in next week as well.