Memory is a stranger, History is for fools Presentist desires, methodological absenteeism, and the illusion of continuity in Early and Early Modern Bengal

Abstract

This document is the PDF version of the Presentation of my seminar, entitled “Memory is a Stranger, History is for Fools: Presentist Desires, Methodological Absenteeism, and the Illusion of Continuity in Early and Early Modern Bengal” was organized by the BRAC University History Club and held on 27 August 2026. The seminar interrogates how complex, discontinuous, and historically changing pasts are converted into apparently self-evident narratives of ancestry, territory, civilization, collective identity, prosperity, victimhood, and belonging. Its primary title, drawn from Roger Waters’s “Perfect Sense,” works not as a rejection of historical knowledge but as an ironic provocation. “Memory is a stranger” destabilizes the intimacy through which communities imagine the past as naturally theirs; “History is for fools” mocks the ease with which fragments of evidence can acquire the appearance of unquestionable historical authority. The seminar examines how presentist desires can turn the past into a mirror of contemporary anxieties. Instead of asking what earlier actors, categories, landscapes, and political formations meant within their own changing contexts, the present may demand that they confirm modern identities, territorial claims, civilizational narratives, or inherited grievances. The seminar describes this as a self-referential process through which fluid histories are made to satisfy present nationalist and identitarian needs. Its second concept, methodological absenteeism, names a subtler epistemic failure: the visible signs of historical seriousness remain—texts, inscriptions, monuments, dates, maps, archaeological objects—while the procedures that make historical knowledge critically accountable disappear. Change, context, causality, contingency, complexity, provenance, stratigraphy, association, and landscape transformation are selectively evacuated. From this absence emerges the illusion of continuity: heterogeneous pasts are retrospectively reorganized into smooth genealogies leading toward the present. Ancestry becomes destiny; pride can harden into supremacy; grievance into inherited victimhood; historical difference into hostility toward others. Yet the seminar does not replace certainty with relativism. Epistemic plurality means that different forms of evidence must be critically compared, not that all claims are equally warranted. Its purpose is to recover historical difficulty—to make the past harder to possess, harder to simplify, and therefore harder to weaponize. The central question remains deliberately unsettling: when we recognize ourselves in Bengal’s past, have we encountered that past—or merely taught the stranger to wear our face?