Preface

Abstract

Braiding together narratives of life experiences, processes of remembering and flattened ideas of time steeped in memory is often an act of defiance against coded histories. It defies submission to linear representation of events that often use emotive, personalized accounts as appendices to descriptions, casting them away from the body of content. Memory, in turn, is a language that speaks for those who are not written into histories. Writing on memory renders the words as if they were shores to waves, oscillating between the slippages of the past and a vast texture of imagination. Writing on memory, in effect, is about drawing on words from feeling, seamlessly. Much of the South Asian landscape, and India in particular, is replete with registers of resistance movements that have shown how collective memory has shaped political ideas about belonging. In recounting these events there is a tendency, especially within historical writings, to draw on figures and icons who were the primus motor of the Indian nationstate project. This process of writing renders those individuals and communities who struggled at the margins against the Raj, and today in post-colonial India, as residual or at best a footnote in the description.