published in Picturing South Asian Culture in English

It is sometimes thought that the sense of history has been granted to India as part of the colonial legacy, but still very much lacking in the popular expression of the local culture1. Myths and stories are systematically opposed to history in the shaping of Indian culture, and history, as a way of looking at one’s past and present, is thought to be only available in the form of the so-called westernized writing, whether it consists in the scholarly studies of historians or in the fictional work of modern creative writers. Understanding the past and the present as separate and linked requires the ability of discriminating causes and consequences, isolating things and events from each other, disentangling real facts from mental constructions, contingent events from eternity, looking at facts from an “objective ” position, that is, first, having some notion of the border separating inner and outer world, subject and object, extracting one self from the moving and otherwise ungraspable sea of events: taking an external, objective stand. To sum up: rationality. Without such rationality, a gift from the Western Enlightenment2, it is thought impossible to reach democracy, which is grounded on the recognition of subject as an individual responsible entity, susceptible of knowledge as power of discrimination. The question of myth or history as the salient feature of the present Indian “way of thinking ” is then far reaching. 1 Hence resulting in a split between the intellectual elite and the popular mass, as stated i