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Recording forgotten history, through talks and tapes

A first-of-its-kind course teaches how to use oral history to reconstruct the past, Malavika Velayanikal reports.

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Often, personal accounts of people are left out of official histories. Though India has a strong oral tradition of stories and passed down experiences, how much aural record do we have of personal stories, memories and perception of ordinary people?

The answer to the challenge is oral history. For the first time in India, the relatively young historical resource has found its way to the classroom. The Centre for Public History, Bangalore, is offering a certificate course in oral history, which introduces students to the theoretical framework of the subjects and its practical components.

Oral history is the collection of people’s testimony about their own experiences as everyday memories of everyday people, not just the rich and famous, have historical importance.

India is a relatively new entrant to the system of oral history. Over the last decade, several independent oral history projects have rendered a relook at Partition, Bangladesh liberation war, Sikh riots of 1984, Bhopal gas tragedy and Gujarat riots of 2002 but a structured programme to train these historians was missing.

“Oral history is vital to understanding history, and I felt strongly that we need to create students of oral history,” says Dr Indira Chowdhury, director, Centre for Public History, who was instrumental in setting up the Oral History Association of India.

Oral history began as a modern movement post World War II. Allan Nevins at Columbia University was the first to initiate a structured effort to record historical material on tape, and preserve them for future. He began to conduct interviews with participants in recent history to supplement the written record.

It was a very important resource in the ‘90s to record the post communist experiences in Ukraine, Northern Ireland peace process and in reuniting Australian aborigines. Now, at the fourth stage of its development, with technological advances and the mass sharing enabled by Internet, the impact of archival material collected has increased manifold.

“When we called for applications, I didn’t think we would get many but we did, and it was tough to pick out just 15 students,” Dr Indira Chowdhury says about the first batch. The batch were mostly PhD students, who already had an oral history project in mind and wanted to know how to use their field study material better.

“Some of them were working on institutional history, community history and even family history. This week-long intensive course gave them a structured framework to place their projects within, taught them how to conduct a rich oral history interview, and acquainted them better with audio recording, transcribing and archival practices,” says Aarthi Ajit, one of the facilitators of the course. 

Shriya Anand, a faculty member of Indian Institute for Human Settlements, who took the course, intends to use what she learnt to document urban change. She is interested in studying the unintended consequences of policies and how it affects people. “The course articulated how to do an oral history project, how to curate the material gathered and present it to a larger audience,” she says.

June 7th is the last date for application for the next batch starting July 22. To apply, visit srishti.ac.in/ccoh2013/

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