REWRITING HISTORY

Satire: with a nod and a wink to posterity



“History is a lie agreed upon.”
Napoleon Bonaparte



Rewriting history or tell me how much you love me again


Telling-it-like-it-was is more complicated than one might think. No revisionist - I mean historian - is interested in backing the loser. Unless that is, it makes the key-pounding wretch look like a hero – a veritable shiner-of-light-on-the-underdog sort of wretch. But in this context, I’m afraid there are situations (and people therein), which qualify for the rubber stamp legend BEYOND REPAIR - all hurt feelings notwithstanding.

Visualise the kind of underdog that determinedly stays underfoot with nothing done or said throughout its downtrodden existence to redeem itself. This genuine bedouin pitiful barely inspires a caption on a tombstone or a line of eulogy, let alone the pages of a history book. This person could be you or I of course. But the fact remains that you can’t help here unless you resort to fiction dressed as history, and therein, I’m afraid, is the whole leg of mutton dressed as lamb.

After all, we never seem to count the what-ifs and might-have-beens and the altogether more assertive would-have-beens when we judge a chap’s history as being beyond repair. I mean, a perfectly honourable fellow may have lurked in the midst of the misunderstood heart of a rascal and every act labelled as rank cowardice may have actually been the sign of a visionary much ahead of his times. The truth of the matter is that it takes imagination to see the truth.

But leaving aside the losers and charlatans for the difficult prospects they are, let us look at the easier picks. To qualify to be written up, ranging, say, from unashamed hagiography by qualified hacks charging by the word, plausible autobiography ghosted by talented but needy authors, or the altogether more stylish memoir, airbrushed, of course, by professional editors, you have to be a big wheel worth the bother and with the prospect of tinkling shekels to match. Even honest to goodness research-laden history needs a grant or two before with a fellowship and a prize thrown in after to actually get done. Any underdogs on this floor have to be Davids-in-the-rough who presently emerge as unlikely (modesty demands), but not undeserving, Goliaths. These are minimum qualifications- there’s a business to run, an interest to sustain, and that’s all there is to it.

But what about the little people with no books to record their histories? Here, what works best is invention and reinvention, particularly of details, which can be boring, right? That the very same thing works in book history, hagiography and memoir is not meant to be surprising or unfair. So, for the drinking and recollecting classes, and for the dry drunks, vegetarians and teetotallers too, handsome former selves with sparkling wit and impeccable morals invariably emerge in the remembering. Humble ancestral homes transform into mansions or vice versa depending on whether it is necessary to project rags to riches or assuage the distress over the tatters one finds oneself in presently. And the narrator, the family historian of the moment, is of course no more capable of telling a lie that the proverbial persons who cannot lie (as a congenital condition), strewn about history, and, it must be noted, marked present in all cultures and provinces to boot.

In home history sessions the ugliest and dullest talk of myriad suitors in the past and the presently dedicated family person tries to stamp out all references to a luridly promiscuous past. A former cheat is obsessed with honesty and regularly holds forth on the subject. The erstwhile goonda is remarkable for his good manners and civility and the formerly faithless veritably shines with faith…The reformed gambler tells cautionary tales and advises prudence in dulcet tones. And Prudence, being a practical sort, talks quietly but firmly of the pill.

It’s been a season of memoirs in the public domain, as it happens, and the latest from the redoubtable President Pervez Musharraf illustrates yet again the phenomenon of a recollection in the rotating saddle that enables one to see both backwards and forwards and out to both sides too. It’s a conning tower, periscope type of vision, 360 degrees worth and alert as a whip. But one in which, the last chapter can, as such, be only written later.

Almost all those remembered by President Musharraf on his Amitabh Bachchan emulating Agnipath as the Delhi wags have it, are important like himself, alive and squealing out peals of clarifications and denials in the face of the general’s audacious recollections. History may, to the purist, be different from memoir but how different depends very much on the guy who’s pounding the keys. Also, and here’s to end on a philosophical note, can it really be called smoking if you don’t inhale? William Jefferson Clinton thinks not but then he got paid a $10 million advance for his memoir My Life to the general’s $100,000, despite His Dapperness labouring away In the Line of Fire, optimism undiminished.

(856 words)
Wednesday 27th September 2006
By: Ghatotkach

This and all original essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005-2006 by Gautam Mukherjee. All Rights Reserved.