History writing and historical consciousness in colonial Assam: A survey

In terms of ideologies which determined the modern contours of historical consciousness, the most powerful and somewhat elusively permanent in view of its association with the nation states, is the ideology of nationalism. The construction of national identity through recreation of a nationalist past has been adequately dealt with by the theorist of nationalism. The nation was imagined to have existed from time immemorial though it is a product of the socio-cultural and economic processes of modernization. Smith states, “The power of nationalism is not only a matter of ideology. Perhaps even more potent than nationalist principles have been nationalist symbols. These give concrete meaning and visibility to the abstractions of nationalism. The representations and images of the nation exert a profound influence over the large numbers of people, exactly because they can be very widely disseminated by the media. In each of the media, specific images of the nation and its liberation, its heroic pasts, and its glorious future can be created and purveyed, so that the nation ceases to be abstract property of intellectuals and becomes the immemorial imagined community of all those designated as its members and citizens. Through opera, music, drama, novels, films and television, artist have continually conveyed the power and tangibility of their nations through a dramatic and artistically authentic re-creation of their heroic pasts.” Hobsbawm stated, ‘What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it; which has always been mixed up with politics, becomes an essential component with nationalism. More so even than the ethnographers, philologists and other suppliers of ethnic and national services who have usually also been mobilized.’