T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: Need for more oral histories

LINE & LENGTH

Oral histories can help us know what happened and why. Really why?

For the last few months, I have been engaged in an extraordinarily rewarding exercise""recording the memories and versions of the main dramatis personae involved in an event that has changed all our lives. The proper name for this sort of thing is oral history.

The interviewees have been assured that what they say will not become public knowledge for some years. This has resulted in a gold mine of information that may not always be available on the files. Never before, I can assure you, have different versions of a reasonably contemporaneous event been recorded in such detail. The work of future historians has thus been made considerably easier.

The importance of this exercise in a country like ours, where no one has any regard for records and history, can't be overemphasised. Electronic communication has made it even easier for the authorities to be cavalier towards record-keeping. Not for us the British habit of filing away everything for posterity, lest it take an uncharitable view of various mistakes and perfidies.

The result is that myths are created and, after a while, they become history. This is not to say that all myths are bad. Some, like the ones around the 1857 rebellion, serve to unify the people. But these are so few that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The rest are merely self-serving stories with just that degree of plausibility which is needed to cast doubts on those who doubt the myths. The family of Indira Gandhi and its servants in the Congress party excel in this practice.

One of the most intractable problems faced by historians, I imagine, is to find out why really a particular thing happened and why it happened in that way and not in some other. This requires memoirs by civil servants, generals, judges and politicians so that the matter at hand can be cross-checked and, even if a consistent picture doesn't emerge, at least the different versions can be placed before the public at some future date. Fortunately, we are getting more of them now.

There is a view that contemporaneous TV interviews serve this purpose and there is perhaps no need either for memoirs or even for oral histories. For very obvious reasons, this is only 10 per cent true.

Mr Karan Thapar, for example, can be hugely entertaining when he performs his most admirable act in his Devil's Advocate programme on CNN-IBN. But because he interrupts so often and sometimes very abrasively, the interviewee actually doesn't have to do much more than just keep his or her cool.

Mr Shekhar Gupta, with his Walk-the-Talk show on NDTV, does an equally admirable job and does manage to extract valuable information sometimes. But the fact that it is going to be broadcast acts as a constraint on the interviewee.

What needs to be asked is: even after 10 years will, say, Jairam Ramesh ever tell either Mr Thapar or Mr Gupta why really he was writing those letters to the Prime Minister about FTAs and so on? Will Mr M K Narayanan tell them why really Shashi Tharoor was put up as India's candidate to succeed Kofi Annan as the UN Secretary General when India could not but have known that he would not get the US vote? I doubt it. But on not-to-be-broadcast-yet oral histories, they would, I am sure. That is where the real value of these lies.

There is, though, a problem, with the Official Secrets Act. This can deter some people from telling all. But one way of tackling this problem could be releasing the material after the person passes on. The time that elapses before the release would obviously vary and could create problems for the living who were also involved. But this is not such a bad thing because it will force the release of their own versions while they are still alive.

Another issue relates to ascertaining how credit for successful management should be apportioned. Obviously, success has many fathers and a contemporaneous oral history will produce many claimants. Civil servants are especially prone to say that but for them, all would have come crashing around our ears. But equally, it will also prevent the few who take the trouble to write their memoirs from running away with the ball.

If you take the subaltern view, you may even want to record the memoirs of the lower bureaucracy, especially those who serve in the private office of politicians and senior officials. These people are privy to a huge amount of information. To exclude them on the grounds that they were not high-up enough on the pole is not a good reason.

In sum, more-or-less contemporaneous oral histories can serve a very useful national purpose and we need a lot more of them. Perhaps a rule can be made that pensions will be predicated on the production of such memoirs and, if that sounds too onerous, a way out can be provided by making it compulsory for them to record oral histories for the national archives before their pensions are released.