Page 183 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

158 Badri Narayan

use of social memories with hegemonic purposes, but are equally
frightened by them. So they erase those threatening social memories
that forces of resistance want to save and preserve, or instead transplant
false memories to suit political ends. This dialectics is a continuous and
immanent part of societal dynamics. During this process, memories
are captured and reutilized, reconstructed and interpreted to serve new
historical needs, and their forms are visualized according to aesthetic
needs. Classes with a hegemonic will are able to transform memories
of those communities that fall within the boundary of their system of
interaction. Nirmal Verma (1995) points out that while claiming to
change the future, dominant forces attempt to change the people’s past.
To change the past actually means changing memories.
Still, many communities are able to keep alive their original mem-
ories as they do not fall under the spell of those hegemonic systems of
communicative interaction. According to Milan Kundera (1990), the
struggle of man against oppressive forces is the struggle of memory
against forgetting. In India original memories are particularly preserved
in rural areas remote from urban centres of cultural dominance, and
they are passed on from generation to generation. Moreover, in any
society memories of the same events that occurred at the same time
take up different forms and originate different traditions. Various com-
munities with differing mentalities and conceptual frameworks are
equally active in this regard. For example, there is ample evidence of dif-
ferences in the historical memory about the Kunwar Singh movement
in 1857 among the rural people of Bhojpur and the rural people residing
in a cosmopolitan city like Patna in the last ten years (Narayan 1995).
Memories, good or cruel, created by the British colonial power among
people do not vanish despite the disappearance of that power.
A queer but symptomatic narrative was heard during fieldwork in
regions near Dehradun. In olden times an English officer used to live
in a bungalow where he had employed an Indian cook. After independ-
ence the officer went back to Britain along with his family, but the
cook continued to live in the same cultural memory of subordination
till death. He did not discontinue his routine activities even after the
English officer went away. For example, he continued to tie on his apron
and put out the plates, knife, fork, etc., on the dining table. He also
copied his erstwhile employee’s daily activities. For instance, he used
to sit on the chair and eat food with a knife and fork in a way similar