 Hi, this is Indira Chaudhary and I teach at the Center for Public History in Srishti in Bangalore and one of the things we do a lot of is recording oral history and I think that's what I'm going to talk about here. So I'll begin with the question all of us really worry about how do we define oral history and especially in you know place like India where there is so much of oral traditions, there's so much of folklore that is oral we tend to often use the two terms interchangeably but as an oral historian when I talk about oral history I don't mean oral traditions. I mean the long interview which is recorded and that's what I'm going to talk about now. So what is oral history and this is what we often break our heads over that is it the recording, is it what you record, is it what you transcribe or are we referring to the method of gathering evidence in this manner as a research method that is oral history and what most of us have discovered is that oral history is all three. It is the recording, it is the transcription but it is also the method by which you do the research. So often we use this term almost interchangeably with the life story interview or the life review interview or the personal narrative and I think what I'm going to emphasize that in oral history there are two people involved. There is somebody who is asking the questions. The questions are being framed by an oral historian and the function of the oral historian is really to jog the memory of the person who is being interviewed and I think when we look at how social sciences look at oral history often I think in the beginning there was a lot of distrust of this method because you know social scientists are taught not to manufacture evidence and this was seen as you know the prompt of the oral historian was seen as something that was trying to create evidence but actually when oral historians started thinking about it they came up with a different explanation because they said what is happening is this is the creation of evidence. This is not really manufactured evidence and they went further by saying this is not just creation of evidence there is co-creation of evidence and that is where I think oral history differs from you know other modes where the interviewee and the interviewer together create something and that is what you know is then interpreted whatever they're creating and that is often new knowledge, new information but more and more there has been an emphasis on how do people make meaning what is this process of meaning making that happens when we you know start doing these oral history interviews and here I think there's some concepts that we have to pay attention to and that is the historian Michael Frisch who did both oral history and public history gave us this concept of the shared authority and shared authority is a term that he talks about where there is shared responsibility where the listener and the person who's talking who's speaking actually have a equal responsibility in creating and interpreting what you know what new knowledge they are moving towards and I think this becomes very very important. Then the other objection that often social scientists had to oral history was that you know this is not objective research how do we deal with that and oral historians like Alexander Portelli has alerted us to the fact that why can't we look at it as why don't we take subjectivity and turn it on its head and say this is research that is subjective so let us try and understand what is happening there is no objective position and he says that because he says that as a listener as the interviewer you are expected to also modify your position the way you think of yourself your own awareness of yourself in the course of the interview and therefore subjectivity but also inter subjectivity subjectivity of you yourself as the interviewer and the interviewer both become very very important and I think sometimes I mean what is very very important to oral historians is that we work with memory and you know that's why often they are these acquisitions or isn't memory unreliable isn't you know this something that you're not going to quite get right but actually what oral historians have found is that even in the written document it there may be inaccuracy inaccuracy of a certain kind so what they have gone on to argue is that there are two levels of engagement you try to find out why the person says what he or she does say and you also want to find out how does memory work in this context and I'll give a little example one is from Portelli's famous work which is called The Death of Luigi Trastoli and Other Stories the main essay in that book is called The Death of Luigi Trastoli now Luigi Trastoli is a union worker in a steel factory in Turney and he dies in 1949 the entire town when Portelli starts doing his work say that no no he died in 1953 and of course this would be enough ground to say look memory is not reliable so do not try to believe them but he says no this is not a matter of belief let us try to find the reasons why they say 53 and therefore Portelli has very powerfully argued that it is important to look at all this what is called misinformation or misremembering and when he starts doing the research he sees that there are many versions people have many ways in which you know they want to talk about this one death and then he finds out that in 49 it was really a protest that was about NATO it was about peace it was not about the factory and at the same time he also finds out that when he was shot dead the entire union had said we will not let people rest we will really do something about this terrible injustice that had happened and in the course of you know his research he finds out actually they did nothing and in 1953 when the union actually rises up in arms and does a protest that is not worthy that is when memory channels everything to that moment and he has a very powerful argument about how memory is used and I think you know it tells you about how people remember how people choose not to remember and therefore that is as historical as if you gave the argument that you know this was memory that was misremembering then you don't have much but you know since he pursues it you get a very rich history from my own experience while doing the oral history archives of you know the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research which was set up by Homi Baba I found that there was a moment when all scientists were telling me about his sudden death as you know he died in an air crash quite unexpectedly and you know the whole institute was in mourning now when I asked them okay how did you get the news what did you do that day almost all of them told me that you know we had a condolence meeting and then we went back to work because that's what Dr. Baba would have liked now a few months later when I start setting up the archives I found these photographs which were of a parsi death ritual happening right below the library staircase in TIFR and at that point I go back to the scientists to some of them to ask that what is this you know there is obviously something happening here which is not quite as you have told me that you know this is not a condolence ceremony so he said oh yes of course we did this this was done for his mother because you know his mother had wanted this and this seemed the appropriate place to have it and it told me that there were several ways in which people remember official memory becomes very strong sometimes in the universe in the institutional context but the other thing was this very personal connection that this institute had with the family is something as the institute grew up it was not always remembered and so you know the different ways in which memory functions and it gives you interesting insights about the institution or how people remember now coming now to you know other forms of interviews that I think your course is looking at particularly because you're looking at ethnography I think one of the things that happens in ethnography is ethnography works with time and space it asks people at a particular time in a particular space about whatever the ethnographer wants to find out and the ethnographic interview often the interviewer has to revise questions as he or she learns more about the place now in the case of you know oral history interviews we actually work more with memory and more with meaning making than with you know time and space of course we are looking at time because we are looking at you know tell me what happened on that first day of independence in 1947 but we don't really look at something that is in the present because we believe as oral historians that we think of the past in the present when we're doing an oral history interview it is a document that is created in the present but it is about the past so you know you have a very rich sort of layered history that comes to you of course the long interview is also something that sociologists do as the qualitative interview and the qualitative interview again is different because the qualitative interview often has a subject it is trying to understand from a group of people about something whereas in oral history we focus on individual memories and we try to locate those memories and contextualize them and see how is this remembering happening at this time and so you know that is you know those are the differences and I think when we look at the you know oral history interview and what we are left with in the end I think oral history demands from us a certain kind of shift in the way we look at that material because you know you can look at the transcription it but it's not enough because if you listen to it if you listen to the interview you'd find the way in which people speak the the volume the rapidity of speech all of these are also bearers of meaning it is not as if you know only the content gives you the process of meaning making so I think this is what you know we do which is different from other forms of interviewing and of course we are focused on the past we are trying to understand the past but the present is always there so basically I think the oral history method goes into a lot of you know details of a person's life and I think an ethnographic interview might gain from some of its methods because you might get a deeper context to what you're doing for example I had done interviews with the scroll painters of Bengal the patachitrakas and you know that they sing a lot of songs which are about disasters which are about the tsunami or about the floods and I remember and there's even one which is about 9-11 and you know it is so far removed from their lives so I think it was because I was doing an oral history interview I asked them I said you know why do you sing about 9-11 you have seen it on television it is not something that you know you have experienced so what what is this song really about is it because you felt these but these scrolls will sell they said no you know we can't write our song without really believing you know that we are right you know that we are there part of the story I said so how are you part of the story he said look I think we have suffered so much we know that we have the experience of floods almost every other year we know what it means to lose a family member to snake bite we know about loss and because we know about loss we could empathize with people who lost their own during this disaster and you know if it was a ethnographic interview he wouldn't have got this detail he was relating this event to his life and telling me why at that point he felt that he could actually understand what these people who he had never met in America or the people who suffered the tsunami went through and I think somewhere this empathy of course all interviews demand empathy but I think the oral history interview empathizes with the people's lives and it also engages with their lives and that's why you end up asking questions which is about their life which you can then bring as a different layer onto your ethnographic interview so I feel you know it would gain if you asked a few questions that were more detailed in depth and about you know that person's life now what the ethnographic interviewer can learn from the oral history interviewer is that we go into details of people's lives and try to understand why today they are the way they are what is it in their experience that has shaped them well I think one of the things that oral historians do they actually engage with memory and I think sometimes there have been questions that you know can historians engage with memory in this way and that that is a very deep question because you know sometimes we pointed out that why talk about memory as being unreliable because memory is helping you reconstruct co-construct a range of things and even ethnographers today are talking about construction rather than you know just culturally you know representing something so I think oral historians tend to bring in you know history and memory and talk about how the memory of something can help us reconstruct the past and you might do it with the help of photographs documents and other things but you would not dismiss memory at all because memory is part of an individual's experience but oral history mainly engages with memory and with meaning making how does my experience of the past enable me to you know make a meaning about what what history is what does my experience tell me about you know what I'm reading or what you know if I have my family talk about the partition then you know what what is it that they are doing in order for it to become meaningful for them so all the partition stories which I grew up listening to which were basically about a village they had left behind were really about making sense of their lives now but it's very different from the here in the now that the ethnographer is trying to capture and so that that remains a difference and you ask also about you know orality and of course you know one of the things about oral history is that we are looking at this spoken word we are looking at people speaking about their experience it is not a diary where someone has written about the past but it is people talking about their past and orality is about the here in now it happens in time it happens in the present but this orality is about many things it is about how we speak about the past what is the language in which that past becomes most meaningful to me for example my grandmother would only speak in her dialect of East Bengal when she recollected those times but if she spoke about how she struggled to become a teacher in Calcutta and how aware she was that she could never go back to that place after 1947 she would use a very different language which was you know not that dialect of a village and I think you know oral historians are also very aware of these kinds of differences that you see and even going back to my example of the Patithya Thakur of the scroll painters there they are used to singing or telling their stories in a particular way and if we were to look at the oral history interviews and compare it to the way in which their other oral narratives are shaped you'd find similarities and differences and I think that's why for oral historians language is so important the you know the oral is so important because you know it communicates so much more than just the content of what is being said