Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi
I was recently invited by the HRDC Nainital Academic College (UGC MMTTC), Kumaun University to deliver two lectures. One of which was on Oral History with special reference to late Professor Lal Bahadur Verma. I am posting the text here for the students who may be interested to know something on the topic. I thank Professor Reetesh Sah, Registrar of Kumaun University for inviting me.
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History begins with evidence. This is perhaps the first principle we teach our students. The historian cannot reconstruct the past simply through imagination, however persuasive that imagination might be. Statements about the past have to be supported by evidence, tested against other evidence, placed within context and subjected to criticism. Yet the moment we accept this principle, another question arises. What constitutes historical evidence?
For a long time, professional historians were inclined to give a privileged position to the written document. The archive became almost synonymous with the historian’s laboratory. Administrative records, revenue papers, judicial proceedings, diplomatic correspondence, private letters, newspapers, chronicles and inscriptions formed the material out of which histories were constructed. The more scientifically history sought to establish itself as a discipline, the greater appeared its dependence upon such documentation.
But there is an obvious difficulty here. Human beings were making history long before they began writing it down. Even in literate societies, only a very small proportion of human experience finds its way into written records. A Mughal revenue document can tell us how much revenue was assessed upon a village, but it does not necessarily tell us how the cultivator experienced the collection of that revenue. A colonial police report may describe a demonstration, but the demonstrators themselves might have remembered that occasion very differently. A government file recording communal violence, migration or displacement can provide us with dates, numbers and official decisions, but it cannot necessarily tell us what it meant to lose one’s home. There is, therefore, an enormous realm of human experience which survives outside the conventional archive. It survives in memory, and it is here that oral history begins.
What Oral History Is, and How It Differs from Oral Tradition
In its simplest sense, oral history is the systematic recording and historical interpretation of memories communicated through the spoken word. The historian speaks to people who experienced an event, participated in a movement, belonged to an institution, practised a craft, inhabited a particular landscape or inherited memories from an earlier generation. Their testimony is recorded, preserved, compared with other evidence and subjected to historical analysis. This sounds deceptively simple, because people have always spoken about the past. Grandparents have told stories to grandchildren, communities have preserved genealogies, soldiers have narrated battles, migrants have remembered lost homes, pilgrims have repeated legends about sacred places and artisans have transmitted knowledge from one generation to another. But oral history as a historical method involves something more deliberate. It converts the spoken recollection into evidence while simultaneously recognising the peculiar nature of that evidence.
An oral historian does not merely ask questions and write down the answers. The historian has to ask several searching questions. Who is speaking? When is this person speaking? To whom? Why is a particular event remembered while another has been forgotten? Has the story changed during repeated narration? Is an individual memory being influenced by a larger collective memory? Has something subsequently read in a newspaper or book entered what the speaker now believes to be a personal recollection? These problems do not invalidate oral evidence; they make it interesting. Indeed, we should remind ourselves that written evidence is hardly free from similar problems. Abul Fazl wrote from within the Mughal court. A colonial district officer wrote as a representative of the colonial state. A police officer recording a political demonstration saw it through the institutional assumptions of the police. A newspaper had its readership and political position. An autobiography was written retrospectively. Even an inscription erected by a ruler was intended to convey a particular image of that ruler. No source speaks without mediation, and the oral source is therefore not uniquely unreliable; it is differently constructed. The task of the historian is not to divide evidence mechanically into reliable written sources and unreliable oral sources, but to understand how every source came into existence.
At this stage another distinction becomes necessary. Oral history and oral tradition are closely related, but they are not quite the same thing. Oral history usually involves testimony concerning events that remain within living memory. A person may describe participation in the freedom movement, memories of Partition, life in a princely state, a peasant movement, a strike, a university agitation or the transformation of a town during his or her lifetime. Oral tradition, on the other hand, can travel much further back. A community may preserve memories of migration over several generations. A family may recount how its ancestors came to a particular village. A shrine may possess narratives explaining its foundation. A caste or tribal community may preserve genealogies, songs or legends about its origins. Here we move from individual memory towards collective transmission.
The great methodological contribution of Jan Vansina was to demonstrate that oral traditions could be studied historically rather than dismissed simply as folklore. In his works Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Method and later Oral Tradition as History, Vansina showed that orally transmitted material has its own structures of preservation, transformation and transmission, and that the historian must reconstruct these processes before using such material. The distinction matters. If an eighty-year-old person tells me what he saw in 1950, I am dealing principally with personal memory. If he tells me what his grandfather told him about 1857, I am dealing with transmitted memory. If an entire community possesses a song about 1857 which has passed through several generations, I have entered the domain of oral tradition. All three can be historically important, but they cannot be handled in precisely the same way.
Memory, Archive and the Limits of Documentation
The greatest misunderstanding concerning oral history arises when memory is treated as if it were an imperfect recording device. We ask whether the witness has remembered the event correctly, as though somewhere inside the human mind there existed a film of the past which has either survived intact or become damaged. Memory does not work like that. Human beings continuously reinterpret their past. An event experienced at the age of twenty may acquire a completely different meaning when remembered at seventy. Subsequent political events, family experiences, reading, conversations and public commemorations may alter the way an individual remembers the original experience. This does not make memory historically useless; quite the opposite. Sometimes what people remember about an event may be as historically significant as the event itself.
Suppose the documentary evidence establishes that a particular incident involved twenty people, while local memory insists that hundreds participated. The simplest historical response would be to say that memory is wrong. But the oral historian asks another question: why did this relatively small incident become so enormous in collective memory? Conversely, something extensively documented by the state may disappear almost completely from popular memory, and that silence too requires explanation. Memory therefore possesses two historical dimensions. It can provide information about the past, but it can also tell us how the past continued to live afterwards. This is why oral history becomes particularly important when we move away from rulers, governments and institutions towards ordinary people.
Archives are indispensable, but archives are not innocent. They preserve what institutions considered worth recording. Governments generated documents because they needed to collect revenue, administer territory, settle disputes, punish crime, conduct diplomacy and maintain political control. Colonialism produced particularly enormous archives precisely because colonial states possessed an extraordinary appetite for information. Yet the abundance of documentation can create an illusion. The peasant appears frequently in colonial records, but usually because somebody else is writing about him. The tribal community appears when an administrator seeks to classify it. Workers enter the archive during a strike. Women often appear when questions of marriage, inheritance, crime or social regulation bring them before administrative institutions. The archive speaks extensively about people who seldom had the opportunity to speak for themselves.
This recognition contributed enormously to the development of oral history internationally. Historians of labour, women’s history, African history, migration and popular politics increasingly realised that many of their subjects had left limited written records. The tape recorder, and later digital recording, opened another archive: the archive of living memory. This was also the insight which eventually attracted several Indian historians, among whom Lal Bahadur Verma deserves much greater recognition than he has generally received.
Lal Bahadur Verma and the People’s Past
Lal Bahadur Verma was an unusual historian. He was a scholar of European history, but his intellectual interests extended far beyond Europe. He was a teacher, writer, translator, editor and public intellectual. His books included Europe ka Itihās, Vishva Itihās ki Jhalak, Itihās ke Bāre Mein, Itihās: Kyon, Kya, Kaise, Adhūri Krāntiyon ka Itihāsbodh, Congress ke Sau Sāl, Bhārat ki Jankathā and Mānav Muktikathā. He translated important works of world history into Hindi, including Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution. Contemporary accounts of his intellectual life repeatedly emphasise the importance he attached to itihāsbodh, historical consciousness.
Before I turn to his ideas, I should make a personal confession. I am a student of Medieval Indian History, and oral history cannot be applied to that field in the same direct manner. I cannot interview a thirteenth-century chronicler or a sixteenth-century peasant. Yet Verma’s ideas have influenced me deeply, because they force us to ask who is absent from our sources and how historical consciousness is formed. I first met Lal Bahadur Verma in Nainital years ago, during a conference. It was a brief meeting, but it left an impression. I met him again at Allahabad, once more during a conference, and those conversations strengthened my sense that history belongs to people and not only to institutions.
This expression, itihāsbodh, is crucial for understanding him. Verma was interested not merely in history as something professionally produced inside universities. He was interested in the relationship between people and their past. History had to become part of public consciousness. Ordinary people were not simply the objects about whom historians wrote; they were themselves makers of history and possessors of historical memory. This brought him naturally towards what we may call jan-itihās, people’s history. And once the historian begins looking for the jan, a methodological problem immediately arises. Where are the people in our sources? They certainly appear in official records, but they usually appear through the language of administrators, policemen, magistrates, revenue officials or political leaders. If we want to understand their own experience, we must sometimes move outside the conventional archive. Verma did precisely that.
One of Verma’s most significant interventions came from his work on the freedom struggle in Allahabad. Allahabad occupies an extraordinary place in the history of Indian nationalism. It was associated with the Nehru family, Anand Bhavan, Congress politics and some of the most important developments in the national movement. The documentary archive is consequently enormous, and the city possesses abundant records concerning political leaders and organisations. But Verma asked a different question. What about the ordinary people of Allahabad who participated in the freedom struggle? What did nationalism look like from the mohalla rather than Anand Bhavan? What did the movement mean to the student who joined a procession, the shopkeeper who closed his shop, the woman who sheltered an activist, the worker who attended a meeting or the unknown volunteer who carried a message from one locality to another? These people had made history, but many had not written memoirs. Verma therefore turned towards their memories.
His intervention entered the professional forum of Indian historians very clearly at the 54th Session of the Indian History Congress in 1993. The Proceedings of the Indian History Congress of that year record his paper under the title “Significance of Oral History: Allahabad during Freedom Struggle.” The title itself is revealing. Verma was not merely presenting some additional information about Allahabad; he was making a methodological argument about the significance of oral history. His larger work on the popular role in the freedom movement similarly attempted to recover precisely those historical actors who disappear when nationalism is narrated principally through organisations and celebrated leaders. This is what I mean by Verma’s attempt at recovering the people’s past.
There is an important difference between writing a history of the freedom movement and writing a history of people’s participation in the freedom movement. The first may be constructed through resolutions of the Congress, speeches of Gandhi and Nehru, government correspondence, intelligence reports, newspapers and political organisations. The second requires us to ask what happened when these movements entered ordinary life. How was a hartal organised in a particular neighbourhood? Who persuaded shopkeepers to close their shops? How did news travel into villages? Who made food for activists? Who carried messages? Where did underground workers sleep? What happened to the families of those arrested? What songs were sung? What rumours circulated? Suddenly the scale of history changes, and when the scale changes, the sources must change as well.
Verma’s contribution lay precisely in recognising this relationship between historical subject and historical source. If we wish to recover the people’s past, we cannot depend exclusively upon documents produced by institutions which governed those people. There is a useful observation attributed to Verma in a study of Muslim women in the United Provinces: history as text may not always survive, but history as memory remains embedded within society. The same discussion cites his Understanding History and his insistence upon an extraordinarily wide conception of historical sources, encompassing archaeology, oral traditions, myths, legends, folklore, official and private documents, newspapers and private papers. This is an important methodological statement, because it means that oral history should not be isolated from other forms of evidence. It belongs within an enlarged conception of the historical archive.
This brings us again to Verma’s concept of itihāsbodh. Historical consciousness is something larger than historical knowledge. A person may know hundreds of dates and possess very little historical consciousness. Itihāsbodh requires an awareness that our present has been historically produced, that institutions have histories, that social relationships change and that ordinary human beings participate in that process of change. Verma’s historical writing repeatedly attempted to communicate this idea outside the narrow circle of professional historians. This explains his extensive writing in Hindi, his translations and the accessible style of works such as Itihās: Kyon, Kya, Kaise. It also explains titles such as Bhārat ki Jankathā and Mānav Muktikathā. The language is significant; it is the kathā of people, humanity and liberation. For Verma, therefore, oral history was not merely a new technique involving a microphone and an interview schedule. It belonged to a democratic conception of historical knowledge. People who had made history had some claim to participate in its telling.
Indian Historians and the Turn to Oral History
Verma was not alone in turning towards oral testimony. Several Indian historians, working in different fields and from different intellectual traditions, have recognised that the conventional archive cannot by itself recover the experiences of ordinary people. Their work has collectively established oral history as a legitimate and indeed indispensable method within Indian historiography.
Feminist Oral History and the Recovery of Women’s Voices
Perhaps the most sustained engagement with oral history in India has come from feminist historians. The Indian women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s generated a profound dissatisfaction with existing sources. Women appeared in colonial records primarily when they were the objects of social regulation, and their own voices were rarely preserved. Feminist historians therefore turned to oral testimony as a way of recovering women’s experiences, agency and consciousness. As Medha Kotwal Lele has observed, women historians across the world realised that women’s voices needed to be heard in order to bring forth the layered and complex understanding of events in history. The post-independence feminist movement in India led to the creation of alternative sources of knowledge, and spaces emerged in the 1980s and 1990s to house these resources.
The Aalochana Centre for Documentation and Research on Women, established in Pune in 1989, was one of the earliest institutional efforts to document women’s lives through oral history. Its first oral history project using the interview method focused on Ganguratai Patwardhan in 1990, and the Centre has since recorded the testimonies of numerous women whose lives would otherwise have left no trace in the formal archive. Similarly, the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW), founded in Mumbai in 1988, built a national archive for women with print, oral history and pictorial material. These institutions represent a recognition that if women’s history was to be written, new archives had to be created.
Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India remains one of the most powerful examples of feminist oral history. Butalia listened to women, children, Dalits and families whose experiences of Partition had been excluded from the high politics of constitutional negotiations and boundary commissions. Her work demonstrated that the history of Partition could not be written adequately without attending to the testimonies of those who lived through it. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin‘s Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition similarly used oral testimony to recover gendered experiences that official documents frequently concealed, particularly the abduction and recovery of women during the violence of 1947.
Uma Chakravarti, a distinguished historian of Buddhism, caste and gender, has more recently been documenting the history of feminist activism in India through an oral archive of videotaped interviews and through film-making. Her Fragments of a Past (2010) on the activist Mythily Sivaraman powerfully explores the themes of personal and historical memory. For Chakravarti, documenting the life histories of feminist activists is itself a form of activist oral history, one that can inform and sustain cross-generational and contemporary forms of feminist activism. This is an important insight. Oral history here is not merely a method of recovering the past; it is a resource for political and intellectual work in the present.
Oral History and Partition Studies
Partition has been the single most productive field for oral history in India. For many years the history of Partition was written largely as high politics. Historians studied the Muslim League, the Congress, British policy, Mountbatten, Jinnah, Nehru, Patel, constitutional negotiations and the transfer of power. All of this was necessary, but the millions who actually experienced Partition remained absent from the narrative. The conventional archive could tell us how many refugees crossed a border; oral history could sometimes tell us what it felt like to cross it.
Sucheta Mahajan of Jawaharlal Nehru University has been a leading advocate of oral history in the field of contemporary Indian history. Her article “Beyond the Archives: Doing Oral History in Contemporary India,” published in Studies in History in 2011, directly addresses the methodological and ethical issues involved in extending the historian’s source base beyond the conventional archive. Mahajan has also been closely associated with oral history initiatives on the freedom movement and Partition, exploring how testimony can illuminate aspects of the national movement that documentary sources cannot reach. Her work emphasises that oral history is not simply about adding new information; it is about transforming the way we understand the relationship between past and present.
The 1947 Partition Archive, founded by Guneeta Singh Bhalla in 2010, represents a different model of oral history practice. This community-driven initiative has documented more than 12,500 testimonies from witnesses and survivors across the subcontinent and its diaspora. The Archive collects, preserves and makes available the life stories of ordinary people whose experiences of Partition would otherwise be lost. While some historians have raised methodological questions about the Archive’s approach, its sheer scale and its commitment to public accessibility have made it an important resource for both scholars and the wider public. The Archive demonstrates that oral history can be a democratising practice, one that allows communities to participate in the preservation of their own histories.
Gyanendra Pandey‘s Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India pushed the methodological problem still further. Pandey asked how violence itself could be written historically when testimony was fragmented, painful and sometimes silent. He demonstrated that silence itself could be historical evidence. Sometimes an interviewee’s refusal to speak, or the gaps in a narrative, reveal more about the trauma of Partition than any explicit account could. This is a crucial insight for oral historians. The task is not simply to collect stories but to attend to what is not said, to the pauses and the omissions that carry their own historical weight.
Anindya Raychaudhuri‘s work on Indian Muslim voices and the 1947 Partition has also contributed to the growing field of Partition oral history, demonstrating how oral testimony can illuminate the experiences of communities whose histories have been marginalised in both Indian and Pakistani national narratives. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar‘s The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia combines oral history with archival research to trace how refugees and migrants negotiated the transition from empire to nation-state. Uditi Sen has similarly combined oral history with archival records to trace how subaltern groups, including widowed women, Dalit refugees and indigenous Andamanese tribes, negotiated state policy and the transition to nationhood.
Dalit and Bahujan Oral Histories
One of the most exciting developments in recent Indian historiography has been the use of oral history to recover Dalit and Bahujan pasts. Badri Narayan, a social historian and cultural anthropologist at Jawaharlal Nehru University, has been a pioneer in this field. One of his major contributions has been to invent new sources for writing history, such as folklores, songs, pamphlets, myths, memories and interviews. His work on the making of the Dalit public in North India uses alternative sources alive in the oral tradition and collective memory of the oppressed and marginalised to explain the contemporary history of Dalit mobilisation.
Narayan’s political biography of Kanshi Ram, the founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party, draws on myriad oral and written sources to illuminate how Kanshi Ram roused Dalits’ self-respect with his homespun idiom and cycle rallies. This is oral history in the service of a broader project: the recovery of Dalit agency and the reconstruction of a political tradition that the conventional archive has largely ignored. Narayan’s work demonstrates that oral history is not only a method for recovering the past; it can also be a resource for understanding contemporary political consciousness.
The work of Gail Omvedt, an American-born scholar who became a foundational pillar of India’s Dalit-Bahujan movement, also deserves mention. Omvedt immersed herself in the philosophies of Phule, Ambedkar and Marx, travelling through villages and connecting with people working with the Dalit-Bahujan and non-Brahmin movements. While her primary method was not oral history in the strict sense, her engagement with grassroots movements and her attention to the voices of ordinary people reflected a similar commitment to recovering histories from below.
Oral History and Labour
Labour history in India has also been enriched by oral history. Chitra Joshi, formerly of Indraprastha College, University of Delhi, has used sources beyond the official archive, including oral narratives and popular literature, to reconstruct the lives and struggles of workers. Her work demonstrates that the history of labour cannot be written adequately from trade union records alone. The experiences of workers, their forms of organisation, their cultures of resistance and their everyday lives require oral testimony if they are to be recovered.
Kanchi Venugopal Reddy of Pondicherry University conducted oral interviews with more than thirty labourers and labour organisers in different locations of the Madras Presidency as part of his research on industrial labourers and their participation in India’s struggle for freedom. This kind of fieldwork is labour-intensive and often goes unacknowledged in the discipline, but it is essential if we are to understand how the national movement was experienced by those at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy.
Oral History and Adivasi Communities
The histories of Adivasi communities offer perhaps the clearest example of why oral history and oral tradition matter. These communities have often been represented in colonial and post-colonial archives only through the categories imposed upon them by administrators, anthropologists and state officials. Their own histories, preserved in songs, stories, genealogies and memories, have rarely entered the written record.
Ezra Rashkow, a scholar of modern South Asian history and environmental history, has collected oral histories of Bhil, Gond, Baiga, Kurku and other Adivasi communities facing conservation- and development-induced displacement in western and central India. He situates these oral histories in dialogue with the colonial archive, anthropological accounts and activist engagements with these communities’ histories. This approach is methodologically sophisticated. It does not treat oral testimony as a simple supplement to the written record but as a distinct and equally valid form of historical knowledge.
Nandini Oza‘s An Oral History of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, based on interviews with Adivasi leaders Keshavbhav and Kevalsing Vasave, demonstrates how oral history can document resistance movements that have received limited attention in the formal archive. The Narmada Bachao Andolan was one of the most significant social movements in post-independence India, and oral history has been essential to recovering its internal dynamics, its grassroots leadership and the experiences of those displaced by large dams.
Nationalist historians drew on folk songs and legends about figures like Birsa Munda and Sidhu Murmu to construct narratives of anticolonial resistance. While these early efforts were not always methodologically rigorous, they established a precedent for using oral tradition as a source for Adivasi history. The challenge for contemporary historians is to build on this precedent while applying the rigorous source criticism that oral history demands.
Institutionalising Oral History
Indira Chowdhury has played a crucial role in moving oral history in India from occasional individual experimentation towards a more self-conscious field of historical practice. Her research on science and scientific institutions demonstrated that oral testimony could illuminate institutional cultures that were poorly represented in formal archives. Her work has also addressed the conceptual relationship between oral traditions, contemporary history, event, memory and experience. When Verma advocated oral history, the method still needed to defend its legitimacy within mainstream historical practice. By the time a later generation of historians developed institutional oral-history projects, the question had changed. The problem was increasingly how interviews should be recorded, catalogued, archived, preserved and made available for future research. Oral history itself had begun producing archives, and there is a certain irony here; a methodology which originally challenged the authority of the archive eventually created new archives of its own.
The work of the Archives on Contemporary History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, which Sucheta Mahajan chaired from 2007 to 2011, represents another institutional effort to collect and preserve oral testimony. These initiatives have ensured that oral history in India is not merely a matter of individual scholarship but an organised and cumulative enterprise, with its own archives, methodologies and standards of practice.
Reliability, Ethics and the Digital Archive
Students inevitably ask whether we can trust oral history. My answer would be another question. Can we trust a Persian chronicle? Can we trust a colonial revenue report? Can we trust a newspaper? Can we trust an autobiography? The historian does not trust sources; the historian interrogates them. Suppose three people remember the same demonstration differently. That does not necessarily mean that oral history has failed. It may reveal that different groups experienced the same event differently. The historian must nevertheless apply rigorous source criticism. The age of the interviewee matters. The date of the event matters. The interval between experience and recollection matters. Leading questions must be avoided. Whenever possible, testimony should be compared with contemporary documents and other interviews. The historian must distinguish between what the witness personally experienced and what the witness subsequently heard. Above all, we must resist the temptation to romanticise the voice of the ordinary person. The subaltern can misremember too. Memory does not become accurate merely because the speaker belongs to a marginalised group. Oral history democratises the archive; it does not abolish historical criticism.
India offers extraordinary possibilities for oral history and oral tradition. Consider 1857. Official reports, military correspondence, proclamations, court records and contemporary newspapers provide enormous evidence, but alongside them survive family traditions, village memories, songs and stories about local participants. Some may contain historically verifiable information; others may have transformed dramatically over generations. Both remain interesting. The historian must ask how a rebel remembered in 1857 became a hero in 1957, and perhaps a different kind of hero in 2007. The same is true of tribal histories, regional traditions, pilgrimage centres, local shrines and memories of migration. Here oral tradition becomes particularly important because the absence of writing should never be confused with the absence of history. This was one of the points that Lal Bahadur Verma repeatedly emphasised in advocating a wider conception of historical evidence.
There is another dimension of oral history which deserves attention. An interview is not simply a source waiting to be collected; it is an encounter between two human beings. The questions asked by the historian shape the testimony, and the age, gender, language and social position of the interviewer may influence what the interviewee is prepared to say. An elderly woman may tell a female researcher something she would never tell a young male researcher. A former political activist may construct his story differently for a historian whom he believes sympathetic to his politics. The historian is therefore present inside the creation of the source. This differs from entering an archive and opening a document written a hundred years ago. In oral history, we participate in producing the evidence that we subsequently analyse, and that imposes an ethical responsibility. Interviewees must understand what is being recorded, questions involving trauma require sensitivity and researchers must think carefully about consent, privacy and the future preservation of recordings. Oral history is therefore both historical method and human relationship.
Today the possibilities are greater than Verma could have imagined when he began advocating oral history. A mobile telephone can record an interview of remarkable quality. Digital storage allows thousands of hours of testimony to be preserved, and photographs, maps and documents can be connected with recorded recollections. Interviews can be indexed and searched, and artificial intelligence will undoubtedly transform this further. Speech can increasingly be transcribed automatically, and large collections of interviews can be searched for names, places and recurring themes. But technology cannot solve the fundamental historical problem. A machine can transcribe a pause; it cannot automatically tell us what that pause means. It can identify that a person mentioned Partition seventeen times; it cannot by itself explain why the eighteenth time the speaker suddenly became silent. Historical interpretation remains a human activity.
Recovering the People’s Past
We can now return to Lal Bahadur Verma. His importance in the development of oral history in India should neither be exaggerated nor underestimated. He was not the inventor of oral history in India. Anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists and historians had used oral testimony in different ways before him. Nor did he develop a theoretical literature comparable to Jan Vansina, Paul Thompson or Alessandro Portelli. His contribution was different. He understood relatively early that democratising the subject of history required democratising the sources of history. This is the central point. If peasants, workers, women, local activists, tribal communities and ordinary participants are to enter historical narratives, historians cannot depend exclusively upon archives created by states and elites.
Verma’s 1993 Indian History Congress paper, “Significance of Oral History: Allahabad during Freedom Struggle,” provides clear documentary evidence of his attempt to place this methodological issue before the professional community of Indian historians. But his contribution went beyond a single paper. His commitment to itihāsbodh, his writings in Hindi, his concern with jan-itihās, his interest in local history and his insistence upon widening the historian’s source base formed parts of the same intellectual enterprise. He wanted history to recover people, and he wanted people to recover history. There is an important difference between those two propositions. To recover people means writing ordinary men and women back into historical narratives. For people to recover history means enabling them to recognise that their own lives, families, neighbourhoods, workplaces and struggles possess histories worth preserving. That is perhaps the most democratic possibility contained within oral history.
When Memory Becomes History
We may therefore return to the title with which we began. Memory does not automatically become history merely because somebody remembers something. It becomes historical evidence when the historian begins asking questions of it. Who remembers? What is remembered? What has been forgotten? When was the story first told? How has it changed? Can it be compared with documentary evidence? What does the manner of remembering reveal about the relationship between past and present? These questions transform recollection into historical inquiry.
Oral history therefore does not represent a rebellion against the archive. At its best, it represents an enlargement of the archive. The document and the memory should speak to each other. Sometimes they will agree. Sometimes they will contradict one another. And sometimes their disagreement will tell us more than either source could have told us independently. This is why the contribution of Lal Bahadur Verma deserves to be remembered. His concern with oral history arose from a larger intellectual commitment: the recovery of people’s agency within history and the cultivation of itihāsbodh outside the narrow confines of professional scholarship.
Shahid Amin‘s Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 remains one of the finest Indian examples of the historical use of memory. Amin brought judicial records and other documentary evidence into conversation with interviews and local memories, asking what happened to Chauri Chaura after the event and how local memory interacted with the national memory of Gandhi and Non-Cooperation. His work demonstrated that oral history could be something more than the recovery of missing information; it could become a history of memory itself.
Partition scholars such as Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin demonstrated how testimony could recover experiences that political narratives had concealed. Gyanendra Pandey taught us to take seriously even the silences surrounding traumatic memory. Sucheta Mahajan has insisted that oral history belongs within the practice of contemporary Indian history, not as a supplement but as a central method. Indira Chowdhury helped institutionalise oral history and extend it into the history of science, institutions and public history. Badri Narayan has shown how oral tradition and collective memory can illuminate Dalit politics and consciousness. Uma Chakravarti has used oral history to document feminist activism, creating an archive for future generations. Ezra Rashkow has collected Adivasi oral histories and placed them in dialogue with the colonial archive. Chitra Joshi and Kanchi Venugopal Reddy have used oral testimony to recover the histories of labour.
But Verma occupies a distinctive position within this larger Indian genealogy. His starting point was the jan. The people were not simply crowds appearing occasionally in somebody else’s archive. They possessed memories, experiences and historical consciousness of their own. To listen to them was not an act of generosity on the historian’s part; it was a historical necessity.
Conclusion
And perhaps this is the thought with which I should end. Every generation leaves behind documents, monuments and material remains. But it also leaves memories. Documents may enter archives. Buildings may become monuments. Objects may enter museums. Memories have a more fragile existence. When the person carrying them disappears, an entire archive may disappear with that person. The oral historian therefore sometimes works against time. An elderly freedom fighter dies, and a particular memory of the national movement disappears. A Partition survivor passes away, and the remembered geography of a village across the border may disappear with her. An artisan dies without transmitting his knowledge, and a technological tradition extending across generations can vanish. A woman who witnessed an event but never appeared in an official document takes with her a history which no archive may ever recover.
Lal Bahadur Verma understood the importance of listening before those voices disappeared. So did the feminist historians who created Aalochana and SPARROW. So did Butalia and Menon and Bhasin when they sat down with Partition survivors. So did Badri Narayan when he collected the songs and stories of Dalit communities. So did Sucheta Mahajan when she insisted that oral history belonged within the professional practice of Indian historians. That is why oral history matters. It reminds us that history does not survive only in archives. Sometimes the archive is sitting before us. Sometimes it speaks. And the historian must learn to listen.
Essential Reading List
The following list is intended for students, teachers and researchers who wish to pursue the study of oral history and oral traditions in greater depth. It is organised thematically and includes both foundational theoretical works and significant contributions from Indian historiography.
Foundational Works in Oral History Theory and Method
Abrams, Lynn. Oral History Theory. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2016.
Portelli, Alessandro. The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Portelli reflects on how to connect personal memories with history and how to fittingly collect and represent the complexity of memory, drawing on interviews with Italian steelworkers, Kentucky coal miners, veterans, refugees and student protesters .
Portelli, Alessandro. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. A foundational work offering a new and challenging approach to oral history from an interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective, examining cultural conflict and communication between social groups and classes in industrial societies .
Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. The culmination of more than thirty-five years of interaction between one of the most influential writers on oral history and memory and the people of Harlan County, Kentucky, weaving together dozens of individual narratives .
Ritchie, Donald A. Doing Oral History. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Thompson, Paul, with Joanna Bornat. The Voice of the Past: Oral History. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965.
Key Theorists and Practitioners
Clark, Mary Marshall. “Case Study: Field Notes on Catastrophe: Reflections on the September 11, 2001, Oral History Memory and Narrative Project.” In The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, edited by Donald A. Ritchie. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Clark, director of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office and co-founder of its Oral History Master of Arts programme, reflects on the methodological and ethical challenges of documenting catastrophe through oral history .
Clark, Mary Marshall, Peter Bearman, Catherine Ellis, and Stephen Drury Smith, eds. After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years That Followed. New York: New Press, 2011. A landmark volume of oral history in which Columbia’s Oral History Research Office deployed interviewers across New York City to collect accounts from first-responders, taxi drivers, school teachers, artists, religious leaders, immigrants and others, producing a deep and revealing look at how the attacks changed individual lives and communities .
Aras, Ramazan, Douglas Boyd, Mary Marshall Clark, Mehmet Kurt, S. Mohammad Mohaqqeq, Claudia P. González Perez, and Lucine Taminian. Documenting and Interpreting Conflict through Oral History: A Working Guide. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. A human rights publication co-produced by Columbia University and the American Institute for Research in Iraq, offering practical guidance on oral history in conflict zones .
Sinclair, Sara, Mary Marshall Clark, and Peter Bearman, eds. Robert Rauschenberg: An Oral History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. A model of institutional and artistic oral history, drawing on interviews with the artist’s collaborators, friends and contemporaries .
Oral History and Indian Historiography
Amin, Shahid. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998.
Chowdhury, Indira. “Memory, Orality and Learning: Reflections of an Oral Historian.” Studies in History 41, no. 1 (2025): 1–18.
Joshi, Chitra. Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and Its Forgotten Histories. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003.
Mahajan, Sucheta. “Beyond the Archives: Doing Oral History in Contemporary India.” Studies in History 27, no. 2 (2011): 281–298.
Menon, Ritu, and Kamla Bhasin. Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998.
Narayan, Badri. The Making of the Dalit Public in North India: Uttar Pradesh, 1950–Present. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Rashkow, Ezra. “Dispossessing Memory: Adivasi Oral Histories from the Margins of Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve, Central India.” In Memory, Identity and the Colonial Encounter in India: Essays in Honour of Peter Robb, edited by Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti. London: Routledge, 2017.
Oral History and Partition
Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
Chawla, Devika. Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India’s Partition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
Menon, Ritu, and Kamla Bhasin. Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Raychaudhuri, Anindya. Narrating South Asian Partition: Oral History, Literature, Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Oral History and Dalit Studies
Narayan, Badri. Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India: Culture, Identity and Politics. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006.
Narayan, Badri. The Making of the Dalit Public in North India: Uttar Pradesh, 1950–Present. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Omvedt, Gail. Dalit Visions: The Anti-Caste Movement and the Construction of an Indian Identity. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1995.
Oral History and Adivasi Studies
Oza, Nandini. An Oral History of the Narmada Bachao Andolan. New Delhi: Routledge, 2021.
Rashkow, Ezra. “Dispossessing Memory: Adivasi Oral Histories from the Margins of Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve, Central India.” In Memory, Identity and the Colonial Encounter in India, edited by Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti. London: Routledge, 2017.
Oral History and Labour
Joshi, Chitra. Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and Its Forgotten Histories. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003.
Reddy, Kanchi Venugopal. Industrial Labour and the National Movement in the Madras Presidency. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Pondicherry University.
Oral History and Gender
Chakravarti, Uma. Fragments of a Past: A Memoir. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2010.
Kotwal Lele, Medha. “Oral History: Telling Our Stories from India.” La Lettre de l’IRMC (2025).
Srigley, Katrina, Stacey Zembrzycki, and Franca Iacovetta, eds. Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge, 2018.
Oral History and the History of Science and Institutions
Chowdhury, Indira. “A Historian among Scientists: Reflections on Archiving the History of Science in Postcolonial India.” Isis 104, no. 2 (2013): 371–380.
Oral Tradition and Folklore
Beck, Brenda E. F., Peter J. Claus, Praphulladatta Goswami, and Jawaharlal Handoo, eds. Folklore of India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Blackburn, Stuart H., Peter J. Claus, Joyce B. Flueckiger, and Susan S. Wadley, eds. Oral Epics in India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Oral History and Memory Studies
Pandey, Gyanendra. Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Novetzke, Christian Lee. History, Bhakti, and Public Memory: Namdev in Religious and Secular Traditions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Reference Works and Guides
Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thomson, eds. The Oral History Reader. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2015.
Ritchie, Donald A., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
MacKay, Nancy. Curating Oral History: From Interview to Archive. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2016.
Indian History Congress Papers
Verma, Lal Bahadur. “Significance of Oral History: Allahabad during Freedom Struggle.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 54 (1993).
Notes on the Reading List
The works listed above represent a comprehensive introduction to the field. Students new to oral history should begin with Thompson’s The Voice of the Past and Vansina’s Oral Tradition as History for theoretical grounding, and with the works of Portelli and Clark for a sense of the method’s range and ethical depth, before turning to the Indian works. Those interested in specific themes such as Partition, Dalit history or labour history will find the thematic sections particularly useful. Researchers planning to conduct their own oral history projects should consult the practical guides by Ritchie and MacKay alongside the more theoretical works. The list is by no means exhaustive, but it provides a solid foundation for further exploration of this vital and expanding field.
