The 46th Annual Conference of the Institute of Historical Studies, Kolkata was held at the L.J.N.J. Mahila Mahavidyalaya, Vile Parle East, Mumbai between 9th and 11th October, 2009. The present volume originates out of the papers presented in this conference. The main theme in the conference was 'history in literature.' Be-sides the principal theme subjects of local history and other relevant topics also found their way for presentation in the conference. In a three-day session twenty-three papers were read and dis-cussed and they form the staff of this book. Having gone through some difficult times during the last few years the Institute did not find it at home to proceed with the publication of the academic output of the conference. Going by the proverb 'better late than never' it has now come out in full earnest to bring the proceedings volume in print. The book is titled The Dialectic of Perception: The relation of history with literature. The aims of history and literature are different. History has always been in the quest of truth; literature is engaged to create and recreate. History does not create. It excavates from the slime of time the frozen attributes of life. For creation literature depends upon its twin armours: imagination and fiction. Imagination is banned in history and fiction is an anathema. Literature cannot state facts of history in a straight jacket form. Then it ceases to be literature. It must have an embellishment of imagination and recourse to fiction which give it a form that is completely different from history. Yet we often rely on literature as a source of evidence for time and its changes. The Vedas, the Ramayana/the Mahabharata, the Puranas are very of-ten treated as sources of history because in ancient India history writing was normally superseded by oral traditions. It was not that we did not have written history. But the matter-of-fact life seemed to be of little concern to the Indians to whom existence was a passing event for the cosmic transformation of the soul. As a result we did not have in our classical past a Herodotus or a Thucydides to describe the real anecdotes of Indian life. The result was that for constructing the history of India's ancient past we have to rely very much on literature for literature then provided the mirror of society.
Thus taking our cue from this that literature sometimes act as a mirror for society we indulged in an in-depth study as to how literature portrays events of history, its characters and its prevalent ethos of life. Here literature is seen as a back-up of history. Biography and autobiography very often provide us glimpses of development around. Foreign Accounts, travelogues, folk verses, bards' songs, panegyrics -all belong in a sense to a genre that governs the writings of history only from supportive sources. The archives and the archaeological remains are the true repository of the sources of history. Oral sources provide a different kind of supportive sources in which memory becomes primary as documents of the past. Literary sources maintain their distinction from oral sources and any other official documents preserved in the archives, like the administrative manuals, settlement records, census data, maps, charts and reports. Although shady as a category of source materials literature is important for history. The present volume is an exercise in finding out the true relation between history and literature. It consists of twenty-three essays written by competent scholars and read in the sessions of the Annual General Conference of the Institute. They vary in their themes, in their approaches to problems and finally in their structuring relations between the two disciplines, history and literature. But at bottom they are all anchored in the discipline of history and show that literature is only a supportive discipline necessary to cushion historical inter-predations. None of them has left judgment to fancy. The worth of the present book lies here. It has bound individual scholarship into a unity of thought. Literature and history are inseparable twins. In the book they manifest as a harmony of the whole.
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