History’s Long Shadow

Margaret MacMillan’s Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History unravels how historical facts can and were manipulated to fit certain perpetuated narratives and pander to groups and identities. This perpetuation can serve a totalitarian government’s purpose of controlling narratives that portray the government and the hegemon as benevolent and superior. In each of her chapters, MacMillan presents history as not just an academic discipline but as a tool for creating political and social consciousness. By giving a range of historical examples, she also explains how these consciousnesses are manufactured in order to elicit nationalism and support for a totalitarian government. 

This book review focuses on her arguments regarding collective victimhood, apologies, and whether a subjective interpretation of history results in crises. She also opines that “historians must not abandon political history entirely for sociology or cultural studies” (p. 28). Finding a linear or a ‘truthful’ narrative in history by unravelling what happened in what sequence of events seems to be her central goal. 

This book served as a theoretical foil for me on which I built my research paper about the relationship between literature and collective memories, particularly the role Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories played as fictive testimonies to the brutalities of the Indian Partition. For this paper, it was crucial for me to study the ways history shapes and is shaped by collective memory and nationalism. Tying the concept of Benedict Anderson’s imagined nations with nationalism in the context of the Partition was interesting owing to the widespread confusion over their newly created national identities. Moreover, similar to how people were confused as to where the border separating India and Pakistan lay, there were “locals who had no idea whether they were Czechs or Slovaks, Lithuanians or Poles” (p. 57). This was after World War 1 when the League of Nations attempted to figure out where the borders ran. 

Despite MacMillan’s fact-deterministic approach to this book, it helped me understand collective memory and how it is easily malleable and not crystallised as the absolute truth (p. 34). The malleability of memory is crucial to examine its literary versions and as fictive testimonies. In my paper, I argued that the repression of collective memory led to the irresolvable tensions between India and Pakistan. Within India itself, the repression of the Partition memory allowed for Hindu supremacy which found one of its origins in the communal conflict to reign in India.

The field of political psychology studies groups’ and individuals’ emotions, attitudes, thought patterns, and behaviours in the socio-political sphere. Intractable conflicts have the potential to completely occupy the central priority in a person’s life. There are long-lasting contexts, meanings, and goals revolving around the conflict. Collective identity evolves based on the experiences, norms, values, and images that the group collectively agrees upon after subtle negotiations. The collective memory formed is a construction of a tragic past that majorly shapes their identity as a survivor or victim of that past. Deprecating the significance of an apology by the perpetrator party towards the victim-survivor negates the reconciliation process that lies behind acknowledging and apologising for a conflict. 

MacMillan acknowledges that assuming responsibility and accountability over a conflict helps all parties to engage with trauma which acts as a healthy step towards institutional support in seeking help in processing it and working towards reconciliation (p. 22). However, she is justifiably concerned about disingenuous apologies that are regurgitated out for reasons other than seeking peace and forgiveness for the atrocities committed (p. 23). While seeking forgiveness without an ounce of regret by the perpetrator, a formal reconciliation cannot be reached since the survivor-victim’s status could be diminished in such a situation (Daniel Bar-Tal, 2013, p. 945). In worse circumstances, it could become the base of another conflict. However, in the event that the victim-survivor group accepts the perpetrator’s forgiveness, the latter would have a decreased likelihood of justifying their own actions in the conflict. Various conflicts occur globally in the current period. 

While gripping onto ideals of factual and linear approaches to history, MacMillan stresses the recent trends in the fields of history while critiquing interdisciplinary approaches to history. She begins by explaining how history is written to economically profit through story-telling of a romanticised past and thus, attracting people to it rather than presenting a simplified, factual version of it. The reader’s identity is brought to the forefront of history when ancestry and DNA checking turns into a trend.

While Bill Clinton’s apology for slavery may not solve the problem of violent racism towards black people and their culture, “we own this past. As such, we have to condemn it” (Timothy Egan, 2015). With apologies, there is an element of the present and the future as history teaches us to navigate it or avoid it entirely. Even if MacMillan claims that “apologies about the past can be used as an excuse for not doing very much in the present”, there is undeniably acknowledgement of accountability that kickstarts the journey towards reconciliation (p. 24). Furthermore, apologising and material compensation can happen simultaneously. There is constant discourse taking place around the past when public apologies or acknowledgements shed light on the atrocities.

To conclude, I perceive this to be a better scenario than one where the perpetrator groups engage in denial about the atrocity or conflict and dehumanise the victims as a defensive strategy. The extreme opposite of this scenario is present in the example that MacMillan describes in a Hindutva India (p. 50). Years after the Indian Partition, we see a steady rise in Hindu nationalism that seeks to manipulate and rewrite history in a Hindu supremacist fashion. The destruction of the Babri Masjid and the politicisation of consuming beef are some of the ways in which ‘history’ is manufactured to serve a propagandist purpose. 

The Hindu nationalist government, as a further step, changed the Indian Penal Code and in exchange, introduced a Bharatiya Nyaya Samhita that came into power starting July 1, 2024. The attempt to change the education system also reflects the extent which an oppressive government reaches to erase any narrative of cultural harmony (p. 52). Between India and Pakistan, there have been an insurmountable number of conflicts and rising tensions between each other, ranging from military attacks, wars, and competition in developing nuclear weaponry. Reconciliation, acknowledgement of the cataclysmic conflict, and healthy processing of collective trauma would allow for a better relationship between India and Pakistan.   

Bibliography

Margaret Macmillian, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, Random House Publishing: New York, 2010. 

Daniel Bar-Tal and Eran Halperin, The Psychology of Intractable Conflicts, Oxford University Press eBooks, 2013, 945, 

Timothy Egan, “Apologize for Slavery,” The New York Times, June 19, 2015,