As the year limps to its close — not with a bang, but a whimper — and the scale and extent of the devastation caused by the SARS-Cov-2 virus gradually become apparent, even as the first vaccines have begun to be administered in countries across the globe, there seems to be unanimity about only one thing — that 2020 will go down as a defining year in human history, and future chroniclers will have much grist for their analytic mills as they try to make sense of what happened and, maybe more crucially, what could have but did not happen, in these last twelve months. The archives that future historians will sift through in the years to come, in physical and digital forms, have already started to take on vast proportions, and it seems unlikely that there will ever be a consensus about the causes, effects, and efforts to combat the virus undertaken by individuals, institutions, nation states, and multinational entities. Much will depend, of course, on when humanity as a whole is able to live with the virus, in much the same way in which it has become accustomed to live with other viruses (the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS springs most readily to mind in this context). If we are able to effectively eradicate the virus (as we did with smallpox) or contain it (polio), then Covid-19 is something our descendants will encounter as a minor footnote in our history. If, on the other hand, as some have predicted, the virus mutates, multiplies, and continues to disrupt lives then there is no predicting where this particular story will end.

These thoughts were prompted by three recent events, each of which has the potential to take on wider and deeper historical importance, and one of proven historical significance which is approaching the half-century mark. The three recent events are, in chronological order, the demonetization of November 8, 2016; the widespread agitation against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act passed by the Indian Parliament on December 11, 2019; and the ongoing farmers’ agitation in the capital city that began on the 25th of last month. The half-century-old event is the defeat of the Pakistani forces through the combined efforts of Bangladeshi freedom fighters and India’s armed forces on December 16, 1971.

I had the great good fortune to be present at a ‘Vijay Diwas’ (‘Victory Day’) celebration held on December 16 this year to commemorate the birth of Bangladesh, where former mukti joddhas (Bangladeshi freedom fighters), retired soldiers from Bangladesh’s and India’s armed forces who had served during the Liberation War of 1971, and civilians who had played important roles before, during, and after the war were present to share their thoughts and experiences. As I listened to the matter-of-fact accounts of these senior citizens, narrating events their younger selves had participated in (one former lieutenant of the Pakistani army recounted his defection to the Bangladeshi side, and how the resulting death sentence awarded to him in court-martial has still not been rescinded; an Indian journalist spoke of finding himself under fire whilst climbing a hill only to realize it was coming from friendly Indian troops; retired soldiers from both countries described how country boats and cycle rickshaws had helped the advance of Indian forces in various theatres of war in Bangladesh; a former mukti joddha-turned-Bangladeshi army commander reminisced of how young Bangladeshis fought the Pakistani army with whatever they could lay their hands on, from bamboo stakes to antiquated 303 rifles; the anecdotes were as various as they were fascinating), one thing became apparent: from March 26, 1971, when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman formally declared Bangladesh free of Pakistani rule, a date celebrated as Bangladesh’s Independence Day, till December 16 of the same year, it was by no means certain to those engaged in the struggle for liberation that their efforts would, in fact, bear fruit, their dreams transform into reality. International opinion was not always favourable either: five days into the war, a December 8, 1971 headline in The New York Times reported the United Nations urging truce, by 104 votes to 11, and calling for the withdrawal of all troops from what was still officially East Pakistan to the rest of the world. Had the UN resolution been heeded, it is likely that the birth of Bangladesh would have been significantly delayed, leading to further bloodshed and genocide. Now, of course, we look upon the struggle and its outcome as something close to inevitable, and Bangladesh as a fait accompli even in 1971, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

No such inevitability adheres to the three recent events I have listed above, nor is there anything inevitable about the way in which the current pandemic will play out; these are all, so to speak, works-in-progress. The tides of history have still not abated enough for us to be able to discern the forces that have created and shaped these phenomena, nor can we forecast how humanity will perceive them in a few years’ (or decades’) time. Commentators (this writer included) have made predictions on the effects of demonetization that have not been borne out by subsequent events; and both the anti-CAA and anti-farm-bills agitations are far from over — trying to gauge their outcomes now is as likely to be perceived as foolish as prescient by later chroniclers. We cannot even be sure of just how these events will be judged by the future. Will these three events become brief endnotes to the larger narrative of a world laid to waste by a deadly pandemic? Or will they be seen as defining events in the narrative of our nation? What will their relationship be interpreted as when considered in relation to the growing authoritarianism of this particular nation state? How will the protests be mapped against the many other events taking place in India and the world at this time — the significance of which may not even have registered with us thus far? These are well-nigh impossible questions to answer, and I am sure there are several others which we do not even know quite how to frame at this moment.

In a 1963 speech to the overseas correspondents of the weekly, Newsweek, in London, Phil Graham, the publisher (and later co-owner) of The Washington Post, had spoken of the “inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand.” Despite the impossibility of making this first rough draft of history, and the perhaps ultimate incomprehensibility of the world in which we exist, we are all inextricably chained to the space-time matrix we were born into, and in which we live, love, grow, experience, and feel. All that we can do is strive to understand our times, and our selves, as best we can, even if we are doomed to fail in this task. Despite its seeming futility, we can, and we must, make an account of our lives and times, not so much for us, here and now, as for posterity; we have no option but to keep adding to the archive. The analysis and the interpretation of this archive remain a task for our descendants.

The author is professor of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, and has been working as a volunteer for a rural development NGO for the last 30 years