Caste Memes: Power, Politics of Memory, and the Historical Imaginary

Abstract

Two great dictators of the first half of the 20th century, Mussolini and Hitler, won the political consent of their people, i.e, Italians and Germans, above all, by pandering to an abstract idea - the sense of history. Even as we move on into the 21st century, as a wave of fundamentalism engulfs many parts of the world, it strikes us hard as we observe that political consent is won by not promising a future to a people, but by reminding them of a perfect past which the populace can only imagine, and will cherish in so doing. At the level of corporeal performativity, it seems (and history is evident), people will protect this imaginary sense of history at all costs. The conclusion of this study is that it is a craving, not for a utopian future but, very often, for a utopian past that drives human political action. Human beings, this essay will try to establish, even as they move towards the future whilst living in the present, want a memory of a great flawless past to be present in what we will henceforth call the ‘historical imaginary’. Also, this paper tries to study (by looking at an anthropological case study involving the Pramalai Kallar subcaste of South India) how Collective Memory of Castes and Subcastes is subject to politics and how such politicised memory appeals to the historical imaginary insofar as it evokes the lower castes to not only speak but also actively participate in the rhetoric of populism, and contribute to the promise of the return of a Utopia now bygone. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” - Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.