51²è¹Ý

Abstract: 

The lecture makes a modest attempt to examine the constitution of what I call the official memory of the postcolonial Indian state. It looks at the crucial sites of official memory and tries to establish a link between the official rituals associated with these sites and the formation of various publics.  The Official Memory refers to the possible ways in which certain historical images, people, and events of national importance are remembered/evoked/commemorated by performing a set of official rituals. In this sense, it expands the contours of the official history—which is produced by government publications, school textbooks, introductory histories of the monuments of national importance and the official websites and web portals of the Government of India. The lecture explores this interesting configuration by discussing the making/remaking of three important sites of memory—monuments, memorials, and Samadhis.         

It is argued that the official memory is a complex configuration. This is a memory, which is intentionally constituted not in an opposition to official history but as a legitimate extension of it. It is given to the citizens for remembering what the state wants to remember. That is why official memory is inextricably linked to the changing priorities of the state. 

Bio:  

Hilal Ahmed is Professor, CSDS, New Delhi. He works on Indian democracy, political Islam, and politics of symbols. He is the author of A Brief History of the Present: Muslims in New India (Penguin-Random House, 2024), Allah Naam ki Siyasat (Setu Prakashan, 2023), Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islam in India (Penguin-Random House, 2019), Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in Contemporary India (with Peter R deSouza, and Sanjeer Alam, Bloomsbury, 2019), and Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monuments, Memory, Contestation (Routledge, 2014). He has also edited Companion to Indian Democracy: Resilience, Fragility, Ambivalence (with Peter R deSouza, and Sanjeer Alam, Routledge, 2021), Rethinking Muslim Personal Law: Issues, Debates and Reforms (with R.K. Mishra and K.N. Jehangir, Routledge, 2022), and Sudipta Kaviraj: A Reader" (Setu Prakashan, 2023).