In order to narrate and organize the past in a systematic manner, a discipline emerged that came to be known as history. Once constituted as an academic subject, it acquired a curriculum, textbooks, pedagogical methods, and institutional structures. Yet a fundamental question remains: what exactly is the nature of the past? The past is not a physical territory that can be surveyed, measured, enclosed, and assigned an owner. Nor is it an object that can be fully quantified and catalogued.
One may collect water in a bucket, store it in a tank, or even contain it within a reservoir. But what of a river? Can that which is perpetually flowing ever truly be possessed? How can ownership be established over something whose very essence lies in movement? Ideas are like flowing water, and so too is the past. One way of imagining the past is as the sky itself. If that metaphor appears excessive, then let us think of it as an ocean. Even if modern technology allows us to calculate its dimensions, what of its depths, its mysteries, and the vast biological and non-biological worlds that inhabit it? Can these be completely measured?
And even if some divine power made such total measurement possible, would that necessarily be desirable? Would it not be preferable instead to cultivate a comprehensive intellectual sensibility that enables us to revisit the past from ever-new perspectives? Human beings approach reality through multiple mo des of understanding. Alongside the poetic and philosophical stand religious, scientific, and historical perspectives, each possessing its own assumptions, methods, and limitations. To bind the past, to measure it exhaustively, or to claim proprietary authority over it – such ambitions appear fundamentally misguided. There are, and ought to be, multiple ways of understanding the past.
Historical inquiry constitutes one such approach. It seeks to construct interpretations on the basis of evidence. Yet even here, no single interpretation can claim finality. Historical understanding requires continual revision, reorganization, and recontextualization of evidence. The p o ssibility of multiple interpretations is not a weakness of historical knowledge but one of its defining characteristics. Over roughly the last century and a half, however, a powerful myth has gained currency: the belief that history can provide a complete and scientifically definitive understanding of the past in much the same way that the natural sciences explain physical objects. This belief, I would argue, is itself a myth.
History is a form of discourse about the past – an important form, but only one among many. It does not possess the aesthetic richness of literature, nor the conceptual rigor and systematicity often associated with disciplines such as linguistics or philosophy. Yet the prestige attached to the scientific claims of history has made it an attractive instrument for particular ideological projects. Consequently, history has frequently been employed as a political tool. The instrumentalization of the past is a distinctly mo dern phenomenon. Attempts to resolve contemporary political disputes through historical narratives are fraught with danger.
One group constructs a history that establishes its superiority while relegating another to inferiority. Inevitably, the latter responds by producing a counter-history that reverses the hierarchy. The result is an endless cycle of conflict in which competing historical claims become weapons in political struggle. How societies ought to remember the past is therefore a question that will continue to arise in every age and every civilization. What should be remembered, and what should be forgotten? Perhaps what deser ve s remembrance is that which serves a meaningful purpose and contributes to the creation of a better society.
The poetic imagination possesses fluidity absent from many historical narratives. In poetry, figures from distant epochs may suddenly appear before us; listeners become emotionally moved; collective memories are awakened. The power of verse can be so profound that heroic ballads may inspire audiences to draw their swords, while revolutionary songs may stir entire societies into action. Poetry can provoke upheaval, but it can also transcend it. By contrast, formal education often seeks to transmit approved interpretations of the past through textbooks. Just as a medicinal preparation may be administered to cattle through a bamboo tube, so too students are sometimes expected to absorb prescribed historical narratives designed to make them “correct” citizens.
The image is telling: the learner tethered like an animal to a post, while imagination itself yearns to fly free. The past cannot be reduced to such disciplinary exercises. Discussion of the past remains indispensable. It offers lessons, warnings, and possibilities for reflection. Above all, it can contribute to the cultivation of ethical values, without which no genuinely better society can be built. Yet such engagement should not devolve into disputes over ownership – questions of whose history is legitimate and whose is not.
The more important question is: how might history become a shared human inheritance? The conversation about the past must be expanded rather than restricted. No individual, community, ideology, or institution can legitimately claim exclusive ownership over it. The historian is not a land surveyor or revenue official empowered to issue title deeds over the past. Historical writing cannot become a proprietary document that grants possession of collective memory. The past belongs to no one because it belongs, in different ways, to everyone. No one can own history.
(The writer is Professor of History, Rabindra Bharati University).