Silencing the past: Erasing the Pashtun struggle from historiography of Pakistan
There is a difference between history as a socio-historical process and history as a narrative. Reproducing the facts, the context and the motivation of the actors in all their complexity (and messiness) and to be called a history is never possible. Marx can focus on finding the concrete in history but the concrete if found will be done so by narrators who will transform the historical socio-political processes through their own ideological and epistemological lens. And the argument can be made that the grain of “Truth” (with capital T representing the actuality of the day to day in the linear conception of the time past) captured by an investigator will be proportional to the ratio of solidity and bias in the theory that the investigator is practicing. The argument that producing history without theory becomes a useless jumble of facts with no sense of meaning remains true for if history is not to inform our today and give a sense to the reality of today then what it is useful for
