ABSTRACT
The story of my engagement with the past is not so much a story of my engagement with the past as the story of a never-ending series of my different engagements with the past and how, invariably, one kind of engagement led to another kind and, in this way, to another kind of past. The only steady engagement was the conviction that the present comes out of the past or that the past has led to the present – which is like saying that there has been one event leading to another and that history is the story of these causal connections which can be reported and understood only in the form of narratives. As E. M. Forster put it, a mere sequence is not a story; but a causal sequence is. ‘The king died; and then the queen died’ is not a narrative; but ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is an intelligible narration because it contains a causal link. It is no good thinking of sequences as chronological sequences, because mere temporal succession does not put events into an intelligible sequence. One way or another, therefore, all history is narration or story-telling. However, this finding, though incontrovertible, solves nothing. On the contrary, as far as my engagement with the past is concerned, it proved a door which opened the road from one engagement to the next. But let me begin at the beginning.
