History? Or just story?

A Contrarian’s Guide to Déjà Vu.

Disclaimer: Any resemblance to past articles, essays, or heated chai stall debates is purely coincidental or perhaps just history repeating itself. But that would contradict my own argument, wouldn’t it?

Yes, that’s me trying to look like a historian. Or a philosopher of language. Or both. And coming across as neither. But the blue looks good. At least to me. So, I let this stay. You may ignore it.

We have all heard it:

History repeats itself.

Wise elders say it with a knowing nod, politicians throw it around to sound intellectual, and WhatsApp forwards declare it as if it were a scientific fact. But does history really repeat itself, or are we just very, very unoriginal with our storytelling?

Now, before you grab your history textbooks (or fire up your favourite AI helper to sound informed, or at least enough to make a counterargument), let’s take a step back. When we say “history,” do we actually mean the raw, unfiltered reality of the past? No. What we really mean is our documentation of the past, the way we recount and interpret events. Indeed, all history is basically human storytelling, from the earliest myths to modern history.

What sort of storytelling is it, though? It is a macro storytelling. It has to be, for the fear of being drowned in the noise that data can be if one drills down too much and focuses on too fine a granularity. It talks of large events, and mostly as cause and effect, which becomes the cause for effect(s) further down the road. Indeed, it is as linear a storytelling as is possible outside of Amar Chitra Katha (yes, I can see the irony here). This happened. And then, that. Parallely, this was happening. Because of which that happened. And so, here we are.

Truth, more or less. But storified truth, taking into consideration all the hard truths, like numbers and documents, archaeological finds and monuments, notations and letters, and combining them with our understanding of father (or mother) issues and emotions, love and hate, lust and desire, gluttony and sloth, greed and piety, jealousy and covetousness, ego and humility, thievery and murder, sale and purchase, short-term thinking and foresight, and a myriad of emotions that are unique to humans. Mix this up, and what you have are stories of humans, whether of a collective or individuals. But stories nevertheless. For we have no other mechanism for narrating the flow of human activity over time.

And herein lies the problem. History, as we know it, is essentially a big, sprawling collection of stories. And like any good storyteller, we humans have an unfortunate habit of sticking to the same old narratives.

The Seven-Story Trap.

Let’s blame Carl Jung first. He came up with the idea of archetypes, universal symbols and characters that keep cropping up in human storytelling. Then, in 2004, Christopher Booker, after 34 years of research, declared that there are only seven basic plots in storytelling.

And what are they? Let’s see.

Overcoming the Monster – Hero fights an evil force. (See: The Indian freedom struggle, where the British Raj was the obvious villain. The Bangladesh Liberation War, where India helped East Pakistan break free from West Pakistan. The Kargil War, where the monster in question was hiding in the mountains.)
Rags to Riches – Underdog makes it big. (See: India’s post-1991 economic liberalisation, where Manmohan Singh and P. V. Narasimha Rao dragged the country out of near bankruptcy and into the global economy. Or Narendra Modi’s own rise from a tea-seller to the Prime Minister, a classic underdog story that his supporters love to tell.)
The Quest – Group sets out to find something valuable. (See: India’s nuclear tests in 1974 and 1998, where we sought the ultimate prize—strategic deterrence and global recognition. Or the Green Revolution, where the quest was for food security and self-sufficiency.)
Voyage and Return – Hero goes to a strange place and comes back changed. (See: India’s ill-fated intervention in Sri Lanka with the Indian Peacekeeping Force in the 1980s. We went in with good intentions, got caught in a civil war we did not fully understand, and came back battered and bruised, but hopefully, wiser.)
Comedy – Chaos ensues, but it ends happily. (See: Indian elections, every single one of them. The Emergency under Indira Gandhi, where democracy was suspended, but in a grand comedic twist, the people voted her out as soon as they got the chance.)
Tragedy – Hero has a fatal flaw and meets a terrible fate. (See: The Partition of India, where the dream of independence came at an unimaginable human cost. The 2002 Gujarat riots, one of the darkest chapters of modern Indian history. Or the economic slowdown after demonetisation, which was supposed to be a masterstroke but ended up causing widespread disruption.)
Rebirth – Hero gets a second chance at life. (See: Post-liberalisation India, which transformed from a struggling socialist economy into a rising economic power. Or India’s space program, which started with rockets being transported on bicycles and now sends missions to Mars and the Moon.)

You get the idea. These seven plots are all we have. So when we look at history, we instinctively cram events into these neat little storytelling boxes. Wars? Overcoming the Monster. Revolutions? The Quest. Economic crashes? Tragedy.

It is not that history repeats itself. It is that we only know how to tell seven kinds of stories.

The Language Trap: Thank You, Wittgenstein.

Now, let’s bring in our next accomplice, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher who once said,

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Translation. If you cannot describe something, you cannot really think about it. And if our language, and by extension, our storytelling, is limited, then our understanding of history is also limited.

Think about it. What if completely new things happen all the time, but because they do not fit into our familiar plots, we either

Ignore them entirely (as if history textbooks do not do this all the time)
Force them into a familiar narrative (see every headline that compares modern events to the 1930s)

tl;dr: History is not repeating. We are just recycling the same plots because our storytelling skills have not evolved.

Counterarguments (And My Smug Rebuttals).

Now, someone, probably a historian or that one friend who loves to correct everybody at dinner parties, might object.

Counterargument 1. “But historical patterns are real. Economic cycles, revolutions, social movements, they do happen repeatedly.”

Ah, yes. But that is because human nature is remarkably predictable. People will get greedy, rulers will get overconfident, and societies will eventually get fed up. It is not history repeating, it is just humans being humans. We are like a malfunctioning GPS that keeps taking the same wrong turn.

Counterargument 2. “But events really are similar. The fall of Rome and modern global tensions, for instance.”

Yes, but is that because history repeats, or because we love comparing things? The moment any superpower declines, someone yells, “It is just like Rome!” The moment a leader rises to power, someone shrieks, “It is Hitler all over again!” It is lazy analysis, like saying every film is The Lion King because it vaguely resembles Hamlet.

Counterargument 3. “If history does not repeat, why do we study it?”

Ah, here is the real reason. History is useful because it helps us predict human behaviour, not because the exact same things will happen again. Studying history is like reading old weather reports. It will not tell you the exact storm that is coming, but it helps you prepare for bad weather in general.

Maybe I should expand the last point (this is a later edit after someone pointed out that while the entire article is quite well-written, I kind of grassed this easy catch at the end). You see, history is studied for a myriad of reasons, not always because we need to learn about our future. Sometimes, humans study something for the sake of it. Sometimes, to determine patterns (like weather or stock markets, though this is the argument I make above). And sometimes, to be able to draw inferences of cause and effect (and in this, I hypothesise, they are almost always wrong). But for sure we don’t study history so that when it repeats, we are ready. I mean, if that’s what you’re doing, it is rather like watching a Rajani film to see how you can handle a dozen goons with weapons with your bare hands. Entertaining, but eventually impractical.