ONE of the cardinal principles of the human idea of revenge is the historical error one has been subjected to. Revenge is virtually a war against the memory of some injustice done to a group or an individual. It is an act of erasing the memory of injustice with its nagging presence in the human psyche. While memory is central to the idea of revenge, at least in modern times, it is the historical past in the name of which revenge is enacted. Most of our memory of the recent past, especially in its collective form, invokes some idea of a historical event.

What kind of historical truth, knowledge or understanding is then fostered by the idea of revenge? Is revenge necessarily about some actual historical deed or is it more likely about some lingering thread of its memory? How do we make sense of such remembering, especially as it becomes instrumental in invoking the desire for revenge? Does it necessarily contain some kernel of the actual past?

Our source and understanding of the idea of revenge depends upon the Janus-faced operation of some past event, where more than its actuality, it is the memory which is mobilized in the public imagination. Here memory functions as the inner trail of the act of injustice and history as the actual manifestation of the past act. Our modern idea of revenge uses memory as an emotional and subjective rationale and history as factual proof of the injustice done.

Forgiveness, on the other hand, demands the erasure and transcendence of the memory of a historical event and its injustices, if at all it was a real one. Forgiveness aims to check the sense of injustice from entering into the frame of our understanding of a past action. Can one then claim that the real distinction between revenge and forgiveness is in the way we comprehend the ideas of history and memory? Advancing such a formulation would raise some serious issues. The most important one would be blurring the divisions between memory and history in our contemporary understanding, especially in its public uses.

A critical historian would be wary of belabouring this point. One may concur with him but perhaps he too would agree with us that forgiveness is essentially about the individual or collective selves, it has a dimension of human subjectivity and demands an inner dialogue. In a rather pithy tone, one could reformulate our initial statement and say that the act of forgiveness touches the sublime depths of human speech; revenge, on the other hand, appears as its cruel scream.

 

While human speech is the root to the way ideas of revenge and forgiveness are linked to subjectivist notions of the past, they equally relate to the multifarious notions of the active elements of the past. Such active elements carry a whiff of being yoked to some real events. However, the depth of the past in the social psyche or memory is not merely linked to our knowledge of some real event, but opens up the difficult issue of the uses and ethical import of the historical fact. There is something to gain here regarding our understanding of history. Both the ideas of revenge and forgiveness tend to simultaneously relate to the real and subjectivist notions of the historical past. But most importantly, what we come to understand is that both are ethical categories. Although revenge can hardly be given an elevated status in the strong ethical sense, but those who argue for it claim that it possibly meets some pressing ethical need for the redressal of historical injustice. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is invariably treated as a truly deep ethical category, since it demands transcendence over real events or facts and our perceptions and feelings linked to them.

Once understood as ethical categories, both revenge and forgiveness pose a major challenge to our contemporary notions of history and memory. Both categories carry a sense of human intent and disposition. Even if revenge is seen as a vice, in certain circumstances one may argue that it be condoned in the light of the injustice done. Forgiveness, undoubtedly, is seen as one of the highest human virtues and all cultures across time have found different ways to articulate it in their mythology, literature and the arts.

We invoke the ideas of revenge and forgiveness as opposites. In actual personal and public circumstances, while one is supposed to shun the demands of revenge, forgiveness is sought to be cultivated as a human virtue. Our understanding of both the categories draws attention to some principle by which to judge them in the light of their grounding in concrete personal and collective situations. Thus, they take the actual historical acts and their experience to the ethical realm. This poses a challenge as to how one would treat a historical event in light of its ethical understanding. Such an understanding of the past is as true of a personal as of a public situation.

 

Forgiveness cannot be discussed without opening up the issue of forgetting. Forgetting is an act of undoing, a deliberate erasure of traces of the past. This is not only a cognitive burden on the part of those who relate to some past event in their present but is also an ethical responsibility. The act of forgetting involves an ethical resolution and a cognitive effort relating to the memory of an event, which may have survived merely as a simple trace. Such a trace could as much represent an actual material or a verbal mark, as also some inherited memory of them. In both cases, as much as historical theory and philosophy have tried to explain, it comes to us as a verbal sign. While the historical past is dependent upon the idea of a trace or mark for the construction of a historical fact, memory too functions through a series of traces. However, even if memory traces are of a different kind, they are increasingly tempered by a historicist mode of understanding the past and seem to invoke an evidentiary paradigm. It is thus the historicization of memory traces and the memorialization of the historical past, which makes its public uses so complex in modern times.

 

History, as an all-encompassing category for the past, has been much contested because of the ways in which the theory of historicism has been central to its evolution. This is evident in most non-western societies, where the lack of a proper historical consciousness has been seen as an anathema for their evolution as a modern society. The familiar translation for history in most modern Indian languages as itihasa is a case in point. Itihasa is an act of recounting, entering into the world of past events, and a mode of memorializing them. As a literary genre, itihasa has been part of the aesthetic and poetic universe and creates its own rasa. Unlike the idea of history in its modern sense, which invokes the narration and analysis of the past on the basis of actual evidence, itihasa, while using the actual events as its basis, is also supposed to be subjective, symbolic and affective. Itihasa reorganizes the experience of past, its sense of time, event and actors, both in an aesthetic and moral sense. In Indian thought, memory, that is smriti, has a very frought status as a valid source of knowledge and has been treated as a form of cognition. It is also used to denote a given tradition; while the memory of an actual event or an object or person is re-cognition, that is pratyabhijna.

 

How would one relate the ideas of revenge and forgiveness with the aesthetic and moral ideas of the past? Apart from the idea of some actual historical event, the notions of revenge and forgiveness work at the levels of our understanding of the past, language and the self. They relate to the realm of ethics and justice the same way literature, myth, and art create a form of civic justice in contrast to that of the state and other juridical institutions. Civic justice works through a large conceptual repertoire which one sees in the cognate categories of revenge and forgiving. Revenge covers a range of emotional responses such as anger, hurt, violence, and rage, and similarly, in the case of forgiveness, the responses are of remorse, regret, shame, guilt and mourning. In many human situations, the ethical dilemmas of the past event are manifested in a narrative resolution. The facticity of the past in the narrative frame keeps revenge as an open moral question and rarely reaches a closure. The act of forgiveness appears as the transcendence of memory through an ethical understanding of the event and injustice.

At the heart of the narrative resolution of the ethical dilemmas of the past is a reconstituted sense of time in which the historical event had taken place, but this equally demands a subjective transformation of the person or the group involved. How then does one situate oneself in the scheme of time? A mere extrapolation of the historicist notion of time prevents us from understanding the scheme under which the narrative understanding and its ethical aspects take shape. How then would our understanding of the acts of revenge and forgetting make us think about the ideas of the past time?

There is much to think about the ethical issues, which are posed by the public uses of historical knowledge. In relation to the way the ideas of revenge and forgiveness relate to the notions of past, it requires critical history to make a move towards what one might term historical criticism. In historical criticism we draw upon the knowledge and understanding of the past in all its available forms. It aims at an appraisal and scrutiny of the larger realm of human history and memory from the scholarly to the public and popular uses. Historical criticism is thus a kind of second order thinking around the production and uses of the knowledge of the past. Here the modern scholarly modes of creating historical knowledge do not remain unresponsive to the public or lay modes of historical knowledge. On the contrary, it takes into cognizance that there can be selective uses of scholarly historical knowledge in the creation of popular history and mobilization of certain forms of social or cultural memory based on it.

 

The idea of criticism in relation to the larger import of historical knowledge and understanding should be understood as much as an act of making critical distinctions as of preparing the ground for appraisal. But criticism is a mode which allows epistemic inquiry and its results to be open and seen in relation to its ethical import. Such an enterprise of historical criticism, needless to say, would have much to share with what is practiced in the name of intellectual history or the history of ideas, concepts and thoughts at large. However, historical criticism, thus understood, would not strive for a custodian’s role of historiography or the historical knowledge. It would rather remain a form of historical inquiry, which shares the methods and ground between intellectual history, where the conceptual, formal and philosophical sides of historical knowledge become primary and historical theory or philosophy of history, in which the central idea of history goes through continuous conceptual exploration. It would be critical in the true spirit of the term, having an open and secular world of shared ideas as its only forte. As for its own method, historical criticism would hardly have one, apart from the ethics of criticism.

 

How would such a methodological point link up with the issue we have been discussing? That is where we need to think about the idea of criticism in relation to reflection and dialogue, two of the central concerns of our idea of criticism expressed here. Reflection represents the ground of thought and dialogue in the available contexts to which historical criticism would be harnessed. The past, reflection, and dialogue create a triangle within which the critical act in relation to history and memory would take place.

We come back to the basic formulation made at the beginning, where the public uses of history have been linked to the impulse of revenge because of the radical errancy of some past event and where public memory is seen grounded in the ethical possibilities of relating the past to the present and thus of speaking for forgiveness. How does this transform modern critical history and historiography to learn for itself? One cannot as a student of history let go this question and be assured of its value and craft. History as a modern form of knowledge, minimally needs to be valued more because of its possibilities in creating humanistic knowledge. What draws us to history as a form of modern knowledge, abounding in numerous experiments and styles of historical research and writing, is its uncharted ethical and aesthetic openings. All that becomes evident amidst a strong commitment to exploring the historical past on the basis of historical evidence.

History as a modern form of knowledge has evolved its own conventions. It has generally been seen as less theoretical than the other social sciences. Its ideological uses, both in scholarly practice and in public life, however, leave one with an eerie feeling, especially when it is invoked as a ground for revenge of past deeds. It is hard to invoke the truth value of history in the face of such ‘uses’ of humanistic or social scientific knowledge, when strong moral and ideological demands become the imperative.

 

Why does historical knowledge and its truth value remain inadequate in making an argument for the act of forgiveness? For us the clue lies in the distinction we have made between the practice of critical history and historical criticism. Both are related and one may say that historical criticism is an act of criticism applied to knowledge and understanding of the available ideas of the past. While historical criticism is very much part of the larger scheme of historical knowledge, its commitment to criticism would require it to deal with the understanding of the past in general. Critical history, as it is understood here, is very much a way to characterize modern historical knowledge as it engages and adopts this general sense of the past. This way critical history is a way to distinguish disciplinary creation of historical knowledge from various other ways in which the past is understood and lived. But it is important to note the way historical criticism thrives on critical history, and critical history in turn can be a methodological tool in the larger armoury of critical history.

We may take a pause and think if what we have considered as historical criticism can be seen as an ethical move in the way we think about our historical past, understand social memory, and live with their public uses. It is instructive to note that memory, in most pre-modern cultures, has been treated as a valid form of knowledge and is not merely some false or fictive version of the past. We have also noted that the distinction between history and memory as true and false versions of the past are not tenable, as increasing instances of historical knowledge being used in the creation of new memories around the past events come to light. The public life of past or popular history pushes one to consider the role of memory in our understanding of the past.

Historical criticism thus brings in its ambit a much larger idea of the past as it is produced in different forms and social spheres, the way scholarly history circulates in the public uses, and the way realms of history and memory intersect. Over the last couple of centuries modern historical knowledge has mainly arisen under the scheme of historicism, which makes one think about the ways in which historical knowledge, understanding, and truth claims of knowing the actual past would engage with the subjective understandings of the past, which works as historical memory and tradition and in the extreme moments is invoked as collective psychic deposits.

 

With history continuously being invoked as the basis for social power and mobilization, where the past becomes the ground and trigger for identity claims and past injustices, the lay or popular ideas of the past seek fresh appraisal. These are not to be treated simply as false ideological versions. Our public ideas of the past lie somewhere between the two, the scholarly and what has been been termed the practical past. There are thus two clear ways in which an understanding of the past exists for us – one is the popular or lived and the other is the academic. At the heart of the very idea of the past is the occurrence of some event, and in most of the popular or lived understanding it is the memory of that event which matters rather than the actual evidence. The occurrence of an event is as much dependent on the way it is perceived in popular understanding. These are the two circles in which a modern understanding of the past moves, one which is pulled towards memory of an event and the other being the evidence based knowledge of that event. This dilemma reveals how a certain ethical import of past knowledge is important.

 

The narrative and conceptual pegs of understanding the past could be extremely varied, spanning over the realms of the factual and the mythical or the socially real and subjective. It is not simply the idea of a truthful history, which remains a historian’s concern, but the way one deals with the past, and the kind of sources and ideas of time and narrative one deploys. This also opens the way, unlike with most other human knowledge, for history to retain its power of aesthetic and literary import. The idea of a real and truthful historical past, however, remains an enigma for historical theory, but the way something actually happened is as inalienable to our engagements with the past. Most of the past is recounted as an allegory or a metaphor and acquires significance because of its symbolic power. For many in the non-western world, history as a new form of knowledge was as much a subject of enchantment as it was of skepticism. The way history claimed to create the knowledge of historical pasts, it could be a tool for both new narratives and identities.

Let’s deal with what is called the public past, or instances of the public uses of the past, as a certain political and social ideology. In some public uses of the past, when history is clearly used for ideological purposes with its full power of a scholarly discipline, one sees the forging of an idea of the lived past claiming academic protocols. Evidently, critical history appears to be in conflict with such kinds of public uses of historical knowledge. Often in these instances, public history despite being ideological driven also claims the status of critical history. In the politics of historical knowledge and understanding, this is where we argue for a method of historical criticism. In public histories epic, popular, and the folkloric narratives dovetail into the modern nationalist, regional or statist myths.

 

The value of a historical period or a formation unambiguously poses a challenge to the ethical understanding of historical knowledge, especially the way ideas of an ‘ancient’ and ‘medieval’ or a ‘feudal’ and ‘capitalist’ period could be treated as bearers of certain ideological functions. Thus, they are shorn of their heuristic uses in the creation of historical knowledge. Historical criticism, that way, can take us a step forward, while they remain firmly grounded in the modes of producing critical historical knowledge. Historical criticism can use the usual explanatory schemes and methods of critical history, such as the usual notions of ancient, modern and medieval periods of past and can yet show that the past is as much an enactment as a form of understanding, while its truth needs to be deciphered on the basis of reliable evidence. This way historical criticism gives us a leeway to refine the heuristic tools of historical knowledge, as it keeps its interpretive and analytical possibilities open. It is instructive the way much of ancient history is now known as the early period and the later medieval times are seen as the early modern.

How would public acknowledgement and uses of critical history and historical criticism fare in situations when a variety of non-professional ideas about the past are available? Is historical criticism merely professional or does its public uses and claims equally represent an engagement with the ideological uses of the past? However, we must remember that a lot of public uses of the past are not necessarily driven by ideological purposes and are creatively used for literary and aesthetic ends. This is where there is much to be revisited in terms of the variety of ways in which the past has been told and used. Critical history, with its social scientific and literary methods, is thus as much a way to create historical knowledge, as it is open to being used and debated in the public.

 

The way cultures are encountering each other, revealing deeper contestations over the notion of social and individual worth in a neo-liberal culture globally, what would revenge and forgiveness, in relation to the past or rather cultural past, mean in times to come? The ethical aspects of historical knowledge and understanding pose a huge challenge to any critical history. But it becomes more puzzling when we are faced with the ways in which we have to weigh between the truth and the perception of past action. Historical knowledge, in my view, needs to address with greater depth and intellectual rigour the ideas of public life of the past, its knowledge and workings. This requires a deeper reflection on the ways in which memory has been understood and the way modern forms of memory use historical facts. Memory is not just an act of random recollection, what it opens up is the realm of experience, cognition and knowledge. Memory functions through actual and real referents too, rather than being vague and fictive. And in many forms of understanding the past, it does not necessarily stand in opposition to history.

 

However, memory is not some wooly idea. It is as carefully constructed as any other category. What is seen as blurring and vagueness of memory, mostly in everyday life, is only recalling information or fact from the past. Memory, individual or collective, since it relates to the past, seeks a concrete kernel of some fact. Nevertheless, what is claimed as collective memory may not be based on some real experience and yet even if its boundaries remain vague it has to invoke something tangible in relation to the past. Memory, thus, works by claiming a sense of the real. No wonder, in modern memory the knowledge of historical past becomes the most powerful source.

In many instances the ideological uses of history to address past injustice thus becomes history’s revenge in the name of some collective or individual memory of the past. Hardly any knowledge form has been claimed or denounced beyond its avowedly neutral pursuit of seeking truth, as has been the case with history. While the truth of the past in modern historical knowledge lies both in knowing and telling, it also helps keep apart the epistemic and ethical dimensions. Historical criticism is an attempt to bridge this gap between the two. History’s revenge is enacted in the name of constant memorialization of an act, while forgiveness begins with forgetting, an undoing of the traces of real events or otherwise. Does not this enigma plead for a more empathetic listening to the ethical meanings of historical knowledge and for revisiting the deeper meanings of human memory?