“Cherished Souvenirs”: Evocative Objects and Material Memory in Select Indian Memoirs on Alzheimer’s

Abstract

The conception of objects as enclosed, discrete, and immanent material has been historically challenged by the theoretical frameworks of Post-Humanist thinkers and Material Cultural theorists, who have foregrounded the historical, affective, socio-political, and cultural embeddedness of objects. The material turn in Memory Studies, examining evocative objects or material possessions, is essentially limited to studies on Partition, indentured labour, refugee narratives, and culinary identities in the Indian context. Within these fields, scholarly outputs have theorized how evocative objects are embodied archives of displacement, history, collective trauma, identity, and intergenerational memory, limiting the expanse of material memory, especially in post-colonial studies. Hence, there remains a significant dearth of scholarly works on the relevance of evocative objects within the framework of health humanities, wherein objects become spatial and temporal emblems of subjective vulnerability, suffering, resilience, identity and care. Addressing this paucity of scholarly engagement, this paper attempts to situate the discourse of material memory and evocative objects within the scope of illness narratives, by exploring memoirs on Alzheimer’s to study objects as meaningful mnemonic assemblages. The capacity of these objects to protrude memory and affective states amplifies their significance in neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s, which pathogenically marks a progressive deterioration of the cognitive, cerebral and neural functioning of the patient. As the brain, and simultaneously the self erodes, material objects can act as repositories of autobiographical memory, thereby retaining the lived experiences of the patients and caregivers in Alzheimer’s. To contextualize this notion, the paper critically engages with two Indian memoirs on Alzheimer’s, namely, Ranabir Samaddar’s Krishna Living with Alzheimer’s (2015) and Veteran DP Sabharwal’s Handling Alzheimer’s with Courage (2018), to analyze how objects associated with the Alzheimer’s body become evocative, embodied and affectively charged by their everydayness, and how these objects can potentially become spaces of alternate identity for the patients after their death. The memoirs, written by the husband as the primary caregiver of their wives, record how ordinary objects become “cherished souvenirs”, evoking specific temporal events and affective states after the patient’s death. Thus, memory is studied as an event that can be realized through objects and their embedded presence, expanding its electrochemical and synaptic delineations. By using the theoretical framework of material memory, the paper seeks to study how the objects associated with the patients (Kanu and Krishna) acquire an ontological status for the caregivers as the self becomes embodied within material objects, which, when passed from the patient to the caregivers, become evocative, mediating a spectrum of affective responses and memories of an impending loss. Thus, these objects are examined as artifacts of remembrances, connecting the deceased body and the caregiver in a liminal zone of identity reconstruction and bonding, thereby facilitating the continuity of the self and identity of both the caregiver and the patient.