Vernacular Literature and Historical Amnesia

Rankean notion of fact as history became so well recognized in history writing during the late nineteenth and twentieth century that causation and reasons for occurrence were looked for in all history. Following his positivism, the Orientalists in India, by branding Indian society as devoid of historical sense, began writing about Indian history. After independence, Indian Marxist scholarship took up the task by emphasising socio-economic transformations. Their greatest contribution was in terms of beginning a new discourse on economic history but in order to achieve that they remained inadvertently committed to the Rankean notion of primary sources and objectivity. In the light of such progression in Indian academia the history writing inherited the basic premise of the Rankean dichotomy between objective and subjective, and in the process, vernacular literature was branded as mythical, which are otherwise very significant as a source of history. This tendency of the historians has resulted in historical amnesia in terms of regional histories. The mythical stories found in orally transmitted vernacular songs are very significant in terms of their context.