Dispossessing memory: Adivasi oral histories from the margins of pachmarhi biosphere reserve, central India

This chapter examines two fortified mathas or ‘monasteries’, Hanumangarhi in Ayodhya and Anandamath in northern Bengal. The former is real - which is to say, it possesses a physical existence outside of our imaginations. The latter is a product of late 19th-century literary fiction. It too is real, though it exists only in our minds. But the word ‘only’ in the previous sentence is misleading: Anandamath is so real that it may be understood as what the French historian Henry Rousso, building on the work of Pierre Nora, called a ‘site of memory’.