When History No Longer Requires Us
Someone is demonstrating, filming, editing, witnessing, making a joke, circulating an argument, sometimes all within the same hour. The Gen Z protest does not end when people leave the street; it continues through another register.
Author, critic, curator and columnist Narendra Pachkhéde in conversation with
Amit Sengupta
Splitting his time between London, Geneva and Toronto, Narendra Pachkhédé’s work moves across political thought, cinema, contemporary art and international affairs. His work has long explored a fairly simple but difficult question: what happens when the political and cultural forms we inherit continue to shape our lives even after the history that produced them has changed?
In Form as History: When History No Longer Requires Us, he returns to that problem through politics, art and public life, asking what remains of historical judgment when older forms no longer quite hold. The book is particularly concerned with the distance between being addressed by history and being abandoned to it: a condition in which events continue to accumulate, but our inherited forms of meaning, responsibility and political response no longer seem adequate to them.
Grounded in political philosophy, he pursued doctoral studies in anthropology as a Commonwealth Fellow and also trained in Film Studies. Cinema and visual arts have remained a constant part of his work, through programming, criticism and writing on visual culture.
His early journalism appeared in The Indian Express, The Times of India and The WEEK. He has since written criticism, political commentary and essays for The Wire, Naked Punch, OpenCanada, Dawn, The News on Sunday, Barakah, and independentink,in among others. His recent curatorial work includes Ranbir Sidhu’s No Limits at the Art Gallery of Ontario. His new book, The Cinema of Unfinished Witnessing, is published by Daraja Press.
If change is not an ‘epistemological rupture’, to use an academic cliché, if it does not wait for a threshold anymore, if it is not announced, and if this is the first condition of your thin, wonderful book, then what is the inner essence, or manifest expression, of change?
NP: It is not just the old language of “epistemological rupture” that I am wary of; sometimes it feels as though we are dealing with “epistemicide” as well: ways of knowing being eroded, displaced, made unavailable.
But I take your question. You are really asking: what does change look like when it is no longer event-like?
I am not sure change has an inner essence.
What interests me in Form as History is something less dramatic: that the conditions of life may already have altered before we have the language to say that they have.
I am not sure our present changes announce themselves through such clean breaks anymore. Quite often the conditions of life alter first, and only later do we acquire the language, concepts or events through which we recognise that something historical has happened.
That is why Raymond Williams is perhaps closer to what I am after with the “structure of feeling,” or what he called “social experiences in solution”: something is already being lived before it has quite become available to us as history.
I came up against this while thinking about the predicament of a younger generation who continue to sit in examinations, apply for jobs, wait for institutions to respond, and still follow the procedures expected of them. But the relation between effort and expectation has changed, between waiting and the future that waiting is supposed to lead towards. You begin to see it in exhaustion, in distrust, in the fading confidence that following the procedure will actually take you somewhere. So perhaps change first appears there, in the terms on which life is being lived, and only later acquires the event, the name, or the historical language through which we recognise it.
If history no longer requires us, then why do we require history?
NP: I don’t think the two propositions are quite opposites. As an an analogy, think of Satyaji Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khilari. Awadh is being annexed, history is quite literally taking place around the two chess players, and they continue with the game. Munshi Premchand kills them at the end of the short story; Ray does something more unsettling in his cinematic adaptation— he keeps them alive. They quarrel, one wounds the other, and then they go back to playing. There is no historical closure.
That comes very close to what troubles me now. We can watch what I have called the genocide in Gaza arrive on our phones, image after image, and still carry on: another meeting, another meal, another shopping, another scroll. The event enters our field of vision without necessarily entering the conduct of our lives. The ICJ case itself remains before the Court; its provisional orders concern rights under the Genocide Convention and do not constitute a final ruling on the merits.
And yet we require history because without it the present begins to look natural. Things produced through violence, conflict, policy, compromise, accident begin to seem as though they could not have been otherwise. Though I am wary here too. In “The Theft of the Present” I was thinking about how quickly we reach for history to explain the present—1968 again, fascism again, another Vietnam.
Sometimes the analogy helps; sometimes it becomes a way of making the present familiar too quickly, of placing it inside a story we already know rather than asking what is actually new before us. And perhaps that is part of the problem. We do not only forget history; we can also use history to domesticate the present.
Perhaps the real crisis is not historical amnesia. What worries me is whether we are ceasing to be meaning-bearers within history; whether events still pass through judgment, memory and obligation, or simply pass before us.
Your argument and starting point, and I agree with you. Politics as management or administered time and space. Ethics as meaningless monologue, or a repetitive narrative without content or values, clichés drummed into jaded minds like innovations, law as blind and impersonal procedure – like Kafka’s Trial, surveillances as normal, bitter realism as post-truth. It reminds me of ‘Culture and Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ written in 1944 by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Do you agree?
NP: I would agree, but only up to a point. The affinity is certainly there. Adorno and Horkheimer were trying to understand how domination could work through repetition, standardisation, culture, ordinary life, not only through force. Kafka gives us something similar in another register: the law as procedure without explanation. And politics increasingly appears to me as the management of people through time and space, through waiting, movement, access, delay and procedure.
However, I think something has changed. “Mass deception” still assumes, in some sense, that people are being deceived. I am not sure that is always our problem now. We often know perfectly well that we are being surveilled, that attention is being manipulated, that institutions are failing, and still we continue.
That is where I become a little less certain about the old faith in critique. The assumption was that if you exposed the mechanism, showed how ideology worked, made power visible, something would follow. But what happens when we can already see quite clearly how the system works and still remain inside it?
I am reminded of that ‘Lacanian joke’: it was definitely not the fish that discovered water! So, yes, Adorno and Horkheimer remain very close, but the problem now may be that awareness and continuation have become rather comfortable companions.
What is loss? Is collective loss also a personal loss? Can loss be only measured in terms of political economy? The loss of the self, how significant is that in the management of social and political life?
NP: I prefer to understand loss more broadly than deprivation. It can also be about the weakening of one’s relation to the world around oneself: to a future, to other people, to institutions, to the sense that one’s life has somewhere to go. Loss still has an object. Something can be named, remembered, mourned.
However, in Form as History, I introduce the nuance that differentiate Abandonment from loss. Abandonment begins when even that relation is no longer secure, when there is no real expectation of an answer or accountability.
So I would not measure loss only through political economy, though of course political economy shapes much of it. People lose jobs, homes, security, access, institutions and even time. But they also lose confidence, expectation, and sometimes the sense that what they do has any consequence. These things are not simply private. We become who we are through families, institutions, language, work, public life. What looks like individual withdrawal or exhaustion often has a much larger social history behind it.
I was thinking about this when I wrote on Jason Arday. What interested me there was the burden placed on someone who is made to represent far more than himself: race, institutional progress, inclusion, success. There are people whom history abandons, but there are also people whom history asks to carry too much. In Arday’s case, the person becomes difficult to separate from everything that has been attached to him.
Similarly, another version of this in Lalit Vachani’s film on Umar Khalid, Prisoner No. 626710 Is Present. A prison number is an administrative fact, but the film keeps insisting on the person behind it. It indexes how a self can be diminished by being made too representative, but also by being reduced to the categories through which an institution knows and manages a life. In both cases, something happens to the person’s ordinary presence and experience of loss.
If survival continues without anticipation, if life persists but its persistence is meaningless, alienated, if the being loses passion, sense and sensibility, enduring the repetitive motions of his/her existential reality like a mechanical creature, (reminding me of Charlie Chaplin’s classic, Modern Times), then we are all Albert Camus’ Outsider. In this absurd scenario of the ‘political unconscious’, how can the ‘Outsider’ discover a radical paradigm shift? Is it possible, this rupture?
NP I am not sure the ‘Outsider’ discovers rupture simply by becoming conscious of his alienation. That is perhaps too simplistic and neat. Chaplin’s Modern Times is useful because the body has absorbed the rhythm of the machine so completely that the gesture continues even when the machine stops. Camus gives us something different: estrangement from the meanings that are supposed to organise ordinary life. But neither condition, by itself, produces politics.
And perhaps that is also why I am cautious about the language of a radical paradigm shift.
What seems more important to me is the point at which a private experience stops being experienced as private. Exhaustion, frustration, waiting, humiliation; these can remain deeply individual for a long time. Something changes when people begin to recognise that what they had understood as personal failure has a social history, that others are living through the same arrangement. I think that is where political subjectivity starts to form, though I would hesitate to call it rupture yet.
What looks like a sudden rupture may have been building quietly for a long time, in new language, new solidarities, small refusals. By the time the break becomes visible, people may already have moved on in how they think and live.
Even culture is being pushed to its limits. The moments of celebration of deeply-felt mourning or aesthetic dissent on prestigious and glitzy platforms like Cannes or Venice film festivals, are not really fake. Look at the applause and support for films like The Voice of Hind Rijab or Naza. A jarring chord of realism has become a tragic symphony of solidarity. So how do you look at this, a repetitive reality, or a subtle and expressed rupture?
NP: I would resist the sentence “nothing changes,” though I understand the exasperation behind it. The forms of violence change, the technologies change, and certainly the way we witness violence has changed. Gaza reaches us through phones, testimony, images, journalists speaking from inside the catastrophe. A case in point for me is woman journalist Bisan Owda in Gaza and that repeated line, “I’m still alive.”
There is something almost unbearable about it because survival and witnessing begin to collapse into one another. Even the ICJ proceedings remind us of another difficulty: law has its procedures and its time, while the violence to which it is responding belongs to another, much more immediate time.
What troubles me more is whether we have overstated the emancipatory power of knowledge.
I still want to believe that knowledge can be liberating, but plainly not by itself. We know an extraordinary amount. We have testimony, satellite images, investigations, archives, legal arguments, often almost as things are happening. But somehow knowledge has to become judgment, and judgment has to find some political or institutional consequence. Otherwise, knowing can remain strangely alongside what is happening.
This is where I keep returning to witnessing. Gaza makes that question harder because we cannot simply say that people did not see. We may see an enormous amount and still carry on. So I am less certain now about the old confidence that making something visible is already a form of emancipation. What happens between seeing, knowing and actually being altered by what we know that, I think, is where the difficulty now lies.
If knowledge is liberating, like parallel cinema becoming mainstream, or turning the mainstream upside down with its creative and political dissent, then, surely, the world is not the same anymore. The huge, continuous and on-going protests by students and citizens alike, including celebrities in cinema, sports, academia, arts and culture, in the West and America, with the ‘capitalist’ social media as both the medium and the message, is this is not a clear sign that the contemporary realm has shifted radically – while the system remains rigid in its transparent and expressed barbarism – as in America, or Germany and India. Even in the UK, Ed Milliband is now speaking a language which is so different, and refreshing, reminding me of his father, Ralph Milliband, a legend in political sociology.
NP: Yes, I think something has shifted but not evenly. You can hear it in the language of students, artists, filmmakers, even people who once stayed safely inside their professions. The mainstream itself has moved. Parallel cinema is actually a good example: what begins outside the centre can eventually disturb the centre’s language, its taste, sometimes even its sense of what is politically sayable.
Social media complicates this further. These are capitalist platforms, of course, built around extraction and attention, but people keep using them in ways the platforms were not designed to contain. The phone becomes camera, archive, witness, organising tool. So yes, consciousness can move very quickly. What I am less sure about is whether institutions move with it. They often don’t. Public feeling can change while the machinery of power remains remarkably intact.
Ed Miliband is interesting in that sense. As UK Foreign Secretary he is now using language about Palestinian suffering that would have been difficult to imagine from a British government minister not very long ago, while Palestine Action continues to remain a proscribed organisation under UK law. I would be careful about making him into Ralph Miliband’s political heir, history is rarely that tidy! But the vocabulary has shifted and perhaps that is the tension of the moment: people are speaking differently, seeing differently, sometimes acting differently, while the institutions they confront change much more slowly.I would not dismiss these moments as symbolic theatre. Something does happen when The Voice of Hind Rajab receives that kind of response at Venice, or when NAZA enters the main competition. These are highly coded spaces of prestige and cultural authority, so when mourning or accusation enters them, the institution has to accommodate something that does not sit easily within its usual language of celebration.
I would add Forensic Architecture to your list. Their A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza Since October 2023 won the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica in Linz this year, and the controversy around it was quite revealing. The work was not simply an image of suffering but it gathered satellite imagery, testimony, geospatial analysis, patterns of destruction and made them available as something one could examine and judge. Evidence does not become public merely because it exists; it has to give it a form.
Cinema can make an event present; Forensic Architecture turns dispersed traces into inquiry. Neither guarantees political consequence.
This is something I write about in my latest book The Cinema of Unfinished Witnessing: Essays on Global Cinema in a Fractured World. I keep returning to the problem of what happens after something has been seen.
Cinema can make an event present in one way; Forensic Architecture does something different, turning dispersed traces into a structure of inquiry. But neither guarantees political consequence. A festival can applaud, an institution can give a prize, a work can circulate widely, and the world outside may remain stubbornly unchanged.
So I hesitate to call these moments rupture. . . don't think these moments are fake, and I don't think they amount to rupture in themselves either. Perhaps what changes first is how an event can be received — what can be shown, named, or no longer kept at the edges. Whether that travels further into institutions, memory or politics is still an open question for me.
Gen Z in India has become the beautiful, pulsating tide of an ocean in revolut, so sudden and spontaneous, and without a damned ideological baggage, that we have all been taken by happy surprise. India is undoubtedly now on a political threshold, which the stagnant, conformist, status quoist ‘Official Left’, never ever imagined, or, indeed, wanted. You have yourself written – make more reels. The reel itself is now a revolutionary experience, the street becoming digital and the digital becoming the streets of rebellion, the barricades of resistance. Students, as in Sorbonne or Berkeley or Calcutta in the past, or against the Vietnam war, or, as in Nepal and Bangladesh recently, they mark decisive, tangible, ruptures in history, like an unfinished graffiti on the wall. How do we add on to the graffiti?
NP: When I said “make more reels,” I meant it partly as a provocation, but I was also quite serious. The reel is not revolutionary in itself; no medium is. What is new is that the old distinction between the street and its representation has become very unstable. Someone is demonstrating, filming, editing, witnessing, making a joke, circulating an argument, sometimes all within the same hour. The protest does not end when people leave the street; it continues through another register.
We saw that very clearly with CJP, where reels, memes, satire and first-person footage became part of the political event itself.
CJP draws my attention to how political subjectivity appears before it has fully found a settled political form — in speech, gesture, reels, occupation, refusal. The question is whether that performance can acquire duration without the organisation that follows beginning to substitute itself for the people who made the politics possible.
But I would be cautious about saying that this has no ideological baggage. Nobody arrives in politics without a history, a language, inherited prejudices, family, caste, class, religion, all of that. What interested me when I wrote “Out of Syllabus” was precisely that some of the inherited political language no longer seemed sufficient to describe what these young people were doing. That is different from saying they have no ideology. It may simply mean that the available categories are lagging behind the experience.And I am wary of rushing immediately to Sorbonne, Berkeley, Calcutta, 1968. Historical analogy can clarify the present, but it can also name it too quickly. So I would keep the graffiti unfinished for a while.
The question is how this political energy acquires duration and memory without simply being folded back into older political forms. I don't think we know the answer yet, and perhaps it is too early to pretend that we do.
How, according to you, can society break through the clichéd conformism of normalcy, rediscover new forms of resurrection, redefine the stagnating threshold of our life and times? Can you see it happening, on the streets with a rainbow of young protesters, in the written text of dissent, in cinema, poetry and literature, in aesthetic ruptures and sublime revelations, in human compassion and the longing for love, in the subtle and invisible joy of living life itself?
NP: I would resist “resurrection” a little. It sounds too complete. Most change I recognise is less dramatic: people recover a language, a confidence, a relation to others, perhaps simply the sense that the present arrangement is not the only one available to them.
You can see that on the street, in cinema, poetry, writing, friendship, solidarity, even in pleasure.
But I would be cautious about calling every beautiful gesture resistance. Art can be absorbed, protest can become ritual, dissent can develop its own clichés and it is co-opted. What interests me are those moments when normality stops feeling entirely natural, when people begin to inhabit it differently. I don't know that I would call that resurrection. But perhaps that is where another possibility begins to become visible.
This interview: Important pointers.
What does change look like when it no longer arrives as rupture? Drawing on Form as History, Narendra Pachkhédé considers a present in which expectation weakens before institutions collapse, private exhaustion acquires a social history, and events can pass before us without fully entering judgment, memory or obligation. The Cinema of Unfinished Witnessing extends that question into the politics of seeing.
The younger generation’s relation between effort, waiting and futurity is one of its strongest concrete formulations.
What worries me is whether we are ceasing to be meaning-bearers within history.”
“We do not only forget history; we can also use history to domesticate the present.”
“Something changes when what we had understood as personal failure acquires a social history.”
“The event enters our field of vision without necessarily entering the conduct of our lives.”
Barring the photos from Instagram and Wikipedia, all photos courtesy of Narendra Pachkhede.