Page 185 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

160 Badri Narayan

However, the display of old memories is fraught with suicidal designs
too. The same Dalit politicians, for instance, are oblivious of the fact
that out of the totality of old memories, only those memories can be
re-activated which are part of people’s everyday life. Only those have a
chance to be remembered and repeated. Periyar and others have
failed to occupy such a position in the psyche of the man inhabiting
in the northern belt of India. We may wonder whether they can ever
be construed as mythical figures. One of the examples of this failure is
the organization of the Periyar Fair in the state of Uttar Pradesh by the
then government led by Mayawati, the Dalit chief minister, in 1995.
In the mental space of the Dalits, the memories of Kabir, Ravidas and
Shiv Narayan survive with the force of myth. Had Dalit philosophy
been successful in developing or deriving a political language from
these towering figures, they would have been liberated from their self-
deceptive political discourse.
The memories of the depressed castes are, at certain places,
offering successful resistance to the efforts of Hindu nationalism. I
would like to give only one significant example. The movement of
Hinduization started by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (literally, World
Hindu Conference) in a tribal community of Orissa discovered that
its greatest hurdles are the memories of the community, in which cir-
culate certain folk stories similar to those which I will present here.
For instance, once a question arose in the minds of people: ‘From the
five husbands of Draupadi, who was dearest to her?’ Five seeds
were planted and she was asked to name the one she loved most so
that the seed could germinate. She evoked the names of all her five
husbands, but that was of no use. When Draupadi remembered the
sixth, the seed sprouted. The sixth was Karna.
Such primitive memories challenge the overall Hindu structure. In
order to erase such memories, a movement is being launched by Hindu
nationalists to articulate and disseminate, by any means, the main
lessons of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. It is a conflict between the
‘little’ ‘primitive’ world of memories and the ‘great’ world of memories
derived from the same primitive source. Similarly, changing the
names of roads and universities is part of a movement for developing
symbols for political use. A game of exploitation of symbols, myths
and memories has begun.