Skip to main content

Whether History Makes any Sense?

History is a favorite subject of many students including me. What history signifies if I wonder? It is not more than memory or time whose reality is fathomed through imaginative zeal. Many social scientists love archeology to excavate the truth in its marginal existence without relating it to the grandiosity of teleological imagination. And most of the historians chose few key words and exclude many others to create a thread of narratives which become a part of curriculum for the younger minds so that they may feel connected to its past, whether glorious or a matter of shame. In the end, to say, that history is not found or discovered but created is not an untrue statement. History is discursive like many of our sciences are, as hegemonic as medical science in form of Allopathy, which doesn't allow the marginal voices of medicine, in fact, most of them are silenced through myticalization as if one form of science has all the rights to subjugate others through otherization. 


Past centuries have been the age of history. I mean, look at the historians across all the genres; be it sciences, social sciences,  economics, or philosophy, history dominated the discourse of 18th and 19th century of Europe. To start with Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Foucault to the historian of science like Thomas Kuhn, each of them loved history, though named it differently like archeology, genealogy and what not. 


History is used as a technique to build the narratives of civilization. Many people prefer history as a teacher, which demonstrates the mistakes we committed in past so as to learn the lessons not to repeat it. Many like history to repair the state of helplessness exists in contemporary moments. History gives a sigh of relief that one was so glorious and wonderful once upon a time, and it awakens the possibility of future as glorious as past. But this sense of nostalgia robs the ecstasy of the moments happening now. Patanjali once wrote that to increase the mindfulness one needs to focus one work at a time. In our age, we want to be robotic but in fact lags behind machines in its efficiency. We all love wandering in past and future but do not like the present and its momentariness. In reality, past is dead and restored in memory. Future is all about imagination. It simply doesn't exist. And what exits is less cared for!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Meeting Justice Rohinton Nariman in a Sunday Morning

Aristotle once wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics that there are four significant virtues for human beings, namely Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Courage. There are a few judges who have courage and sense of justice, both. Hon'ble Mr. Justice Rohinton Nariman has been truly an exemplar judge and erudite historian, theologian and philologist, a great scholar of music as well as a courageous and meticulous jurist of our country. He did his Master of Laws from Harvard Law School in 1980-81 and taught by one of the finest jurists of the last century, Roberto Unger. He became Senior Advocate in 1993 in the age of 37 and also served as Solicitor General of India in 2011 before he was elevated as a judge of the Supreme Court of India in 2014. He delivered many landmark judgments, including Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. There are a few people with whom time moves too fast, but to count that experience takes ages. Justice Rohinton Nariman is one of those great jurists with whom a meet...

The Rhythm of Law: A Book Review

Book Cover of the Book Law is the subject and object of curiosity since the ancient civilizations started its journey of contemplation about the order within the nature; its mysterious paths inspired the germination of metaphysics. Initially, human's mode of existence lived as instinctual life as per the call of nature. Instincts were primarily used as a medium for survival and to receive the call of wisdom from the “order of nature”. Humans are primarily one of the modes of expression of the nature, as Spinoza calls it attributes which express the essence of God and modes which are derived from the essence of God or nature (Spinoza, Ethics). The doorway of all the laws, as brooding presence of harmony, may be received if one is alert to recognize its call. Prof. Raman Mittal has penned a beautiful book titled “The Rhythm of Law”. The uniqueness of the book is its potentialities to express the inexpressible wisdom. Martin Heidegger in his Magnum Opus, Being and Time, expresses the ...

Violence of Law and Ethics of Care

The worldliness of world is constituted by care (Martin Heidegger). Only in our concernfull dealing with the things around, the existence of being may be understood. In our everydayness of care and concern the world appears to our consciousness. Care is the language, a nomos of our existence, yet it is hardly perceptible in a world of law, which was rightly defined by Hans Kelsen and Max Weber as “legitimate use of violence”. The monopoly of political state over the violent nature of law makes it the most elevated institutions in relation to various social orders co-existing with the political state. Politics, once conceived as “an art of possibilities” by Harold Laski, is now becoming merely a language of allegations, counter-allegations, trickery and manipulation, in one statement, it symbolizes the archetypical character of violence whose expression is apparent in the existence of law. Violence has become our mode of existence in a sense that it speaks through us when the humanity f...