When Suroopa Mukherjee, professor of literature at Delhi University, started working on her book on the Bhopal gas tragedy she turned not to the usual sources of traditional history but the oral testimonies of the survivors of the industrial disaster that took place in December 1984. "If a particular incident is centred around an event like an industrial disaster, the survivors are the ones who would have experienced it. Their take would be very different from the way a monolithic power like a government or a corporation would view the disaster," says Mukherjee, whose book, Surviving Bhopal, was published in 2010.
She says while the official documents coming out of the corridors of power "misrepresented the disaster in every possible way, oral history offered an interesting perspective so that the sheer travesty of justice could be brought out in the open."
Oral history, a stream that is often ignored by the traditional historians, finally got a platform earlier this year with the formal registration of the Oral History Association of India. Its first meeting was held last year.
Indira Chowdhury, director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Public History at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, and one of the moving spirits of the association, says oral history is about working out a perspective of the past by focusing on lived experiences. "It is about people's memories and their lives. Unlike journalistic interviews, which can be topical, the oral history interview is commodious - it addresses all events and memories that the interviewee has lived through."
The association's members come from different fields, not just history because, as Mukherjee says, oral history itself is interdisciplinary. She points out her own example of someone with a background in literature.
"The idea is to create common platforms for the practitioners of oral history - and out of our collective experience take forward theorisation, address elements of practice and the standards of archiving," says Chowdhury. The association's inaugural events in July included a talk by professor Pramod Srivastava of Lucknow University on the oral testimonies of prisoners from the infamous Cellular Jail in the Andamans and a public screening of Deepa Dhanraj's Kya Hua Is Shahar Ko.
Chowdhury herself got involved with oral history while setting up the archives of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai in 2002. She had begun with a 15-session interview with the scientist Obaid Siddiqi, conducted over two years. "I realised I loved listening to people recount their life stories and I also loved to observe the way their individual lives crisscrossed with history. I have been hooked to recording people's stories ever since." She has since then set up the archives of Dr Reddy's and of the Naandi Foundation.
The Centre for Public History has also created the archives for Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta, which include more than 84 oral history interviews. Piyusha Chatterjee, curator with the Centre for Public History and joint secretary of the Oral History Association, says working on IIM Calcutta's oral history archives made her realise there is a whole world that's lost by not talking to people. "It also helped me deconstruct a bit of the Calcutta of the 1960s and the '70s," she says.
The Centre for Public History has also begun running a certificate course on oral history. Earlier this month, the centre conducted a winter school in oral history in Bangalore, the first advanced programme of its kind in the country, which had renowned oral historians Alessandro Portelli and Miroslav Vanek as faculty. "We are also creating oral history archives for India International Centre, Economic and Political Weekly and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences," says Chowdhury.
A few business houses that have been setting up their own archives, such as Godrej, have also begun recognising the importance of oral history. "Corporate structures too have hidden voices," says Vrunda Pathare, chief archivist with Godrej Archives. Oral history, says Pathare, helps to capture the transcendental knowledge that flows in the organisation. "You can find company policies in the official records but it is the experiences of the people within the organisation which are very interesting." The archivists at Godrej interview those employees who have completed over 25 years in the organisation and record their experiences.
More workshops on oral history by the Centre for Public History and events by the association are on the anvil. And an ambitious plan to put in a bid to host the conference of International Oral History Association in 2016. "We will bid for it at the association's conference in Barcelona next year. We will know next year!" says Chowdhury.
