Historical interventions:The conflict between change and loss in India

Often as historians, we are interested in the origins of the stories, narratives, spaces, and events. For example, the advent of colonialism and its apparent socio-political endeavors is one way to look at modern South-Asian history. However, apart from origin stories, it is equally important to focus on the afterlives and the changes visible in present times brought up by colonialism and other historical happenings for that matter. I argue that instead of looking at history as a chronology of events separated from each other, we need to look at how historical events, through their encounter, collectively shape our understanding of the present. Colonialism did not cause a rupture in the social life of Indian people. Neither did it entirely change the way people interact with food, architecture, and even food.

Although subjected to a huge social and political loss, India embraced colonialism through a process of give-and-take from the colonizers. Taking Dr. Zaman’s words this “change was not inseparable from loss”, there was no fixed line between the new order, and older culture and tradition. Ghalib’s lament on Delhi’s destruction and the poetry on Shaher-e-Ashob was a way to mourn the havoc caused by the mutiny of 1857. However, their poetry saw Delhi only through the lens of destruction and could not encapsulate the fact that the daily life of masses was not entirely overturned or replaced by a new order. Even though the Mughals had officially been replaced by the British rule, people continued to experience the previous ways of living amalgamated by the changes brought up by colonialism.

Seventy years after the British rule, one can hardly draw a line between the previous mode of life and the changes inculcated by the British. Our architectural structures are a mixture of the pre-colonial period and the colonial period. One cannot compartmentalize architecture based on the euro-centric chronology of history, i.e. the pre-colonial, the colonial, and the post-colonial. We can certainly situate a certain building in a particular historical time, but cannot claim that the advent of colonialism caused erasure of the previous architecture. They exist side by side without making us realize the fluidity of ideas of the pre-colonial and the colonial. Post-colonial is not an outcome of the loss caused by a new system of ideas, but a culmination of the interaction between the pre-colonial and the colonial, if one wants to see history through a linear lens.

The inseparability of loss and change also defies the notion of authenticity of ideas regarding cuisine, and linguistics. We tend to associate old Lahore and Delhi as the bearers of authentic food, and culture, a contested term. However, modernity, colonialism’s major aftermath, brought about major shifts in the food taste and its consumption patterns. So, the claim about the authenticity of the food is no more than a particular nostalgic expression about the city which sees (old) Lahore as a place of food immune to any change for ages. However, there has been a change in the quality and access to ingredients. Given the surge in population, consumption patterns have changed drastically. So though the taste has changed over time, which is in itself a loss of something one sees as pure and particular to this city, our general ignorance of these changes implies that it is impossible to detect the changes that happened across ages in the apparently authentic food we consume. The same goes for the linguistics. We simplify the linguistic complexities by arguing that Urdu, which was used before colonialism, was replaced English and is now prevalent in our conversations, educational institutions, and as an official means of communication. In reality, however, both languages are used side by side. Neither has English taken over entirely nor has the status of Urdu remained the same.

The story of change and loss is a simultaneous phenomenon where both seem to have a conflict to make space for themselves in the social life of India, and elsewhere as well. If the former happens, it signals the initiation of the latter but not an altogether displacement. So, the talk about the five-century old colonial intervention in Mexico also argues that in the process of a conquest i.e. the change, there is always something which remains unchanged making the transformation an amalgamation of half-change, half-loss.