They sat them down upon the yellow sand, 
Between the sun and moon upon the shore; 
And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland, 
Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore 
Most weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar, 
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. 
Then some one said, “We will return no more;” 
And all at once they sang, “Our island home 
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.”

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson/ The Lotos-Eaters/ lines 37-45

If I were to misplace one rosebud
and confuse night with a hare,
or even if one whole wall
of my memory were to disintegrate,
I am oblieged to make over the air,
Steam, earth, leaves,
hair, even the bricks,
the thorns which pierced me,
the speed of flight.

-  Pablo Neruda/ Memory/ Isla Negra 

The question is “Who are we apart from a collection of memories?” To lose our memories is to stop being the person we are. Regaining our memories engender a whole new being as it does in Ritwik Ghatak’s film ‘Titas Ekti Nadir Naam’, where everything  had just started with a whole new meaning with the protagonist’s regaining consciousness. The regaining of memory in the film undoubtedly prepares the audience aspiring a fresh start of a conjugal life, love and a feeling of saying ‘yes’ to life. However it all fades away promptly when within moments of gaining consciousness the protagonist collapses finally, succumbing to his injuries. The drunken soldiers in Tennyson’s poetry wish to stay back in the island because they loathe the idea of returning. The lotos-eaters are overcome by their present state of mind. Their thoughts of their immediate predicament have out-shadowed the older memories of their Fatherland, their children and wives and slaves. Human beings have a propensity for chosing what is convenient to them. They would cling to memories that produce pleasure, feelings of goodness. They would rather give up the present and remain in a cocoon with an ancient memory that produces good feelings. They can ruthlessly disclaim the past to cling to the present if it promises a feeling of goodness. The approach to the choice of memories is conscious and dichotomical. Where the protagonist in Ghatak’s film struggles to retrieve his past in order to prove his being to his long lost wife, and Neruda tries to integrate himself against all odds clinging to his sense of being; the lotos-eaters combat to achieve a state of oblivion, trying to deny their past in a state of bliss. This tendency of trying to shed off older memories like shedding off the old skin is what Pamuk refers to among the Turks in his  novel The Black Book (Chapter Six: Bedii Usta’s Children). It is a madness of getting Westernised that Pamuk refers to. The Turks no longer want to cling to their traditional costume, their old gestures. Bedii Usta’s mannequins, which he made to look as real Turks, dressing them in traditional outfits, now seem that they “…like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance in a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was. It was this lost memory that pained us, reduced us to ruins, though we still struggled to be ourselves. Our gestures, these things made us who we were, the way we wiped our noses, scratched our faces, and kicked our feet…..But in their poses and their gestures they resembled so closely the customers and the crowds filling past the shop windows, they were so ordinary, so authentic, so much “like us” that no one would even look at them.” 

To live in a city is to expose ourselves to the incessant influx of flows of thoughts, perceptions, and experiences of city life. Is it this exposure that lures us to settle down in some other country that we consider is better than our own? Does this very act then help us forgetting what we really were? Does it help replace our fears of being at the margin? Is it thus that we tend to forget things conveniently? 

The baggage of history that stays with us is what we term as ‘memories’. Our memories are part of our bodies, our minds, our brains. They seem to be entrapped by our bodies. The body therefore acts as a container of our memories, which thus travel with us as the body travels. Its shape changes with the body allowing itself to the experience of the new. But they never spare us. Memories on the other hand are what globalization cannot and perhaps will never be able to obliterate. They are the only weapons that can shield the flattening effects of globalization.  

And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things. 
Is there confusion in the little isle? 
Let what is broken so remain.         
The Gods are hard to reconcile; 
’Tis hard to settle order once again. 
There is confusion worse than death, 
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain, 
Long labor unto aged breath, 
Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars 
And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson/ The Lotos-Eaters/ Choric Song VI  

Memories tend to expand in the following way: from the individual to the local and then to the collective, moving further to take the shape of national memories and finally becoming cosmopolitan. The point is, do cosmopolitan memories tend to replace our individual memories? Debates over political expressions of regret, apology, reparations and restitution as well as ways to account for historical injustice have gained significance all over the world. But do they help foster a common framework and vocabulary for this search across cultures and national boundaries? Is a ‘collective memory’ emerging at the global level? Following the analysis of Daniel Levy, Professor of Sociology, the memory of an event at the national level (Prof. Levy here specifically takes the example of the post-Holocaust memory) shares the mutual recognition of the memory of the ‘Other’, not just the public recognition of the victors or those who hold power, and not just the public recognition of the victims’ memories as well as perpetrators.  Publicly recognized historical narratives belong more and more to victims, their heirs and the newly defined categories of witness and bystanders, as well to the perpetrators of atrocities. Prof. Levy argues that the representations (of the Holocaust in his case) have now become paradigmatic for cosmopolitanized memories. Keeping this theory into account, how do we, the Asians view each other in the continent as we share each others history? What tag do we attach to our neighbours as we raise our fingers to them as sources leading to countless human massacres? How do we reconcile to facts such as the French President’s announcing the rejection of the burkha as it subverts the dignity of the human race? How do we see each other as the carriers of our own historical baggage since the inception of the colonizers? What affect us as heirs to our national leaders, or for instance, the Gandhian principles? How do we reconcile to our Gods?  

The past by nature is irrecoverable, once lost, it exists only as traces in archival form that is however subject to changes. The grammatical trace that Derrida mentions of, is created when a word is partially erased, placed ‘under erasure’ and yet continues to assert its existence; thereby creating a paradox between existence and non-existence; between absence and presence. The trace at once confirms the origin but undermines its structure and meaning. It therefore questions its origin. Often what is left (physical trace, mnemonic trace) is more real than the original event. The trace itself becomes the origin of a completely subjective event. The same principle applies to memories, too. Memory is often a bias. It is often false. It is then that the secondary memory that replaces its roots. Having said so, how does an Asian artist, who has been to a country in the West, or straddles his Motherland and a Western country (for instance Iran and Germany) relates to these traces of older memories, as newer ones that are apparently cosmopolitan in nature keep replacing them? How does the artist situate him/herself in a place where he is a complete outsider? How does he explain this perpetual feeling of guilt that haunts him surreptitiously? There is a never-ending comparison that goes on between him and the world about him – its people, its food, its clothing, and its body language – its entire culture. 

Being an Asian means being an Oriental and subsequently, not being an Occidental. The ruler at the centre is the Occident. Being an Occidental therefore means not being at the centre, but in the periphery. For an Asian there is still a desire for a global footing. There is always an anxiety of being at the periphery, being at the margin. The idea here is to probe the irrational self-hatred that many Asians have of their culture and tradition; to find out how do we Asians speak? It is about the formulation of the past in our memories. It is about the way the human mind constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs events over time.  

I have chosen to work with two sets of artists – the first being diasporic Asian artists and the second being predominantly Indian citizens and figure out in what ways their approach to memories is contradictory; to find out in how the gaze of one differ from the other as their homes change?  

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