History and Memory

"what we remember depends on how we remember"

Nikulin tries and connects history and memory, and shows how they co-exist. He talks about how personal memory attaches itself and exists further on, to and as a collective memory. Now memory is an account of the past, but collective memory becomes history, which is essentially becomes the experience for the present to learn or understand their current situation/condition and what led to it. History is selective, so is memory. Historians choose events they think are important and make it history. There are several factors that go into selecting these events. The events might be what brought about a radical change in how things were, or it was something that was considered important by the society the historian belonged to, or quite simply it could perhaps be something the historian had to glorify due to his circumstances. Memory is similar. We choose to remember things/events that affected us. It might be personal, it might involve others. But we basically choose to remember these events because they stood out. Collective memory, in my opinion and from what I figured, is an involvement of others in remembering an event. So, when an event occurs in the presence of a group of people, they form individual memories about. In this case, collective memory is probably all the individual memories combined and filtered to form an account of that event. This is a drop of history. And just like a historian is selective about his data, the collective memory too chooses to omit parts of the event, or chooses to represent it in a certain way. Several collective memories go into a historical account. But the historical account talks about the event from probably the recurring parts of the collective memories involved. So the collective memory, as it belongs to a group, tends to be partial. But as history involves sifting several collective memories, becomes less partial, if not completely. Personally, I think an impartial history is quite unlikely due to, quite simply put; human nature. The historian’s a human after all.

History is constructed in an order the historian chooses. He selects the hierarchy of arranging the data. Memory, on the other hand, is a recollection, which happens at random. It isn’t organized into paragraphs, and the order of recollection tends to be haphazard. The historian arranges the data in a certain order so as to project the actions or happenings with due importance, and what the present can learn or understand from it.

Memory, as mentioned earlier, is biased. Because it is personal, even when it is collective, it is personal to the group. Also, because it never stays the same. We tend to exaggerate or underplay things when we recollect memories. To connect it with the radio show, as the tests show that an amnesiac would be the one with the most original memories, if he/she comes to recollect them. This, they pointed out was because each time we recall a memory, it becomes more made-up. But history is a little more consistent that way. As its written, there isn’t much reconstruction that would be done to it, as the historian tries to base history on/around facts.

I reckon history would be incredibly banal and too comprehensive if it came down to writing completely detached accounts of events. But at the same time, it shouldn’t be something that ostracizes or criticizes something/someone just because the historian’s era had that on public demand, as that would be misleading the future that would read and try to understand that history.

Hari Shankar.