The zigzags of history are usually so displeasıng – or sometimes even humiliating that we rather prefer steer clear of them to reach the shores of its vast Oceans. These criss-crosses set us to take up a hassle-free, painless route to accomplish our goal which is to paint our past as superbly as gratifies our ego and emotions. Though apparently pretty, the effort is incredibly bogus enough to divorce us from the roots of reality and sturdily get us hitched with myth. It does not stand the test of logic at all and blurs our vision terribly.
It is our prejudice that pushes us to cling to pretty parts of our legacy and ignore arbitrarily its brutal, savage, shameful and ugliest ones. This we do to Sustain and boost up our phony sense of civilizational glory and ethnic pride or what the most frequently quoted Persian idiom Pidarum Sultan booed signifies. That our ancestors were capable enough to register their cultural superiority and aristocratic pre-eminence in history is what this proverb denotes amply and succinctly.
Even though we understand that Our cultural drapery is made of many different threads and colours we remain doggedly selective in our approach; consciously refusing to endorse history as a strange mix of pride, power, penury and sadness. We simply treat it as a bunch of roses and, thus, pick up what suits to dye our story as a glowing heritage piece and in the process make history a soft target for our clandestine motives. This finicky demeanour overtly makes history a sharp divisive weapon and a cache for heightening up sentimentalism and lowering down substance. It manifests our stubbornness, obdurate mindset, intellectual under performance, knowledge bankruptcy and foresight deficit and total estrangement from our past and its bitterness.
Subjectively glorifying our past and portraying it as a brilliant and unimpeachable historical heritage and altogether skipping over its nastiness prevents us, from fully appreciating the depths of history and fathoming out its mysteries in their proper perspective. lt thwarts us to erect a podium of authenticity, objectivity and sensibility which are so indispensable for an adequate understanding of the real soul and heartbeat of a nation, its cultural ethos, language, aspirations and attitudes; makıng us, thus, regard everything indigenous as sacrosanct, unchallengeable and beyond rectification.
Evidently, it is our subjectivity that influences us to close our eyes to the pitfalls and malevolence of our ancestors, their naivety and imbecility and overlook the heaps of follies and stupidities they have left behind while traversing the hazardous socio-economic cliffs to knit the knotty threads of our storyline. This subjectivity impels us to relish history’s beauties only and confine our visits simply to its sundrenched pastures; a treacherous trend that has botched us miserably to evolve an appropriate strategy to resolve our problems and, thereby, ensure a systematic social engineering and political restructuring.
History is like a potter’s pot which has ample space to accommodate everything right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and evil and myth and reality. Its dirty, pretty things operate jointly to generate its delicate texture and rich tapestry. They are so intrinsically interlinked that neither of these can be set apart, even for a fraction of a second, while sketching the outlines of our identity. Splitting them into compartments or divorcing them from one another would signify nothing but uprooting the tree of our existence, undoing its branches, leaves and fruits and loosening the nuts and bolts of our life story besides distorting its specifics. Such an attempt would lead us nowhere in our task to unfold the multicoloured assortment of our individuality and instead render us topsy-turvy as a community of sorts.
to be continued
Dr. Abdul Ahad is a well-known historian of Kashmir. He presents a perspective on the Kashmir issue and talks about Kashmir’s history and individuality and personality.
