ORAL HISTORY: NARRATING WOMEN'S SPACES

Gemma Scott

PhD Candidate, History

Keele University

g.scott@keele.ac.uk

Gemma is a final year PhD candidate in History at Keele University, UK. Her research examines the history of India’s Emergency (1975-1977) and is particularly interested in women’s experiences and activism during this period. The project is based on oral history interviews, extensive archival work in India and a fellowship at the Library of Congress (USA). Her work is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK.

‘Oral history started out primarily because we wanted to listen to those who had gone unheard.’

(Allesandro Portelli, 1997 58)

The importance of oral history for voicing narratives that remain absent from other historical sources (newspapers, archives, published materials etc.) is well established. Because of its ability to voice such narratives the method has persistently been located as an empowering one. Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson note:

The interviewee can be an historian as well as the source…Moreover, for some practitioners oral history has not just been about making histories. In certain projects a primary aim has been the empowerment of individuals and social groups through the process of remembering and reinterpreting the past (Perks and Thompson, 1998 1).

As well as this kind of empowerment resulting from the ability to actively construct one’s own history, oral history methodologies have contributed to a revision of several fundamental aspects of History as a discipline. It has brought notions of authority into question, expanding our understandings about whose narratives ‘count’ in the construction of our pasts and has prompted explorations of the power relations (and inequalities) at stake when we, as historians, make history. For all of these reasons, oral history is now a staple in the feminist historians’ methodological tool kit.

My doctoral research examines India’s period of Emergency rule (1975-1977) under Indira Gandhi’s Congress Government. This has been a long term interest for me as the subject of my Undergraduate and Maters dissertations. With a fairly decent grasp of the existing scholarship around these events I constantly found myself asking the question, ‘where are the women?’ Scholars have not considered how women, as individuals or in organised groups, engaged with the State of Emergency, either in support or resistance. A vast amount of scholarship on this period comes from political science. This has as a concern with events high up at the government level and a desire to explain the reasons behind this infamous suspension of democracy at its heart. Even with recent historiography where scholars have turned to examine resistance to the regime (Guha, 2007) or the impact of its various measures on people’s daily lives (Tarlo, 2003; Clibbens, 2014) women are almost nowhere to be seen.

Because of its capacity to ‘listen to those who had gone unheard’ I quickly decided that oral history would be an important part of my methodology. As I expected, women’s voices were also hard to come by in relevant archives in India. So I interviewed twelve women in Delhi and Mumbai about their Emergency experiences in the broadest terms. As this period remains one of the most politically controversial in independent India’s history, all of the women who responded to my requests for interviews had taken an oppositional stance. I therefore had twelve narratives that illuminated my picture of how women engaged with organised resistance to the Emergency regime, something entirely absent from both existing scholarship and archival collections.

In his discussions of oral history, Allesandro Portelli also makes some brief references to space. He states: ‘in memory, time becomes place’, whereby recollected pasts exist both within the space of the mind and through their associations with both temporality and spatiality (1997, 32). Discussing the way in which in which narrators often interweave depictions of their personal, communal and institutional experiences, he defines these categories of experience by their reference to ‘political and spatial referents’ (37). As I sifted through my interview transcripts I was struck by the emergence of space and place as a prominent theme. The women I spoke with described their experiences and agitational activities within specific and recurring sites – the home, the university campus, the prison. All of these places were notorious sites of state repression and intervention during this period. The home was a target for the government’s vigorous slum clearance programmes, democratic dissent within universities was stifled and authorities imprisoned opposition on a huge scale. But the women I spoke with located these spaces as sites of resistance and agency. They described their engagement with underground activism and distributing uncensored literature and resistance material on campus. Some talked of holding meetings and sheltering prominent figures of the repressed opposition parties within their houses, and others described communities of solidarity within prison walls.

Historian Patrick Clibbens’ recent work critiques the prevailing conception that the Emergency only happened in Delhi and its surrounding northern regions. He traces this misconception to the Shah Commission of Inquiry’s reports. This Commission, set up to investigate abuses of power under Emergency, did focus largely on Gandhi and her son’s influence over this region. This narrow geographical outlook pervades, but by considering the implementation of some of the Emergency’s notorious measures in Bombay, Clibbens challenges this perception. My oral histories support Clibbens in posing this challenge. They demonstrate instances of both state repression connected to the Emergency and lively cultures of resistance to this (in which women played active roles) in various states and union territories including Delhi, but also Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. My oral testimonies, then, show that the methodology does more than allow us to listen to those who have gone unheard. Oral history not only prompt us to reformulate dominant understandings about whose narratives ‘count’ in Emergency historiography, but also to re-asses which spaces ‘count’ in the geography of this resistance.

References

Clibbens, Patrick, ‘The Destin of this City is to be the Spiritual Workshop of the Nation”: Clearing Cities and Making Citizens during Indian Emergency, 1975-1977’ Contemporary South Asia 22.1 (2014) 51-66

Guha, Ramachandra, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London: Macmillan, 2007)

Perks, Robert and Thompson, Alastair, ‘Introduction’ in R. Perks and A. Thompson (eds.) The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge, 1998) pp.1-8

Portelli, Allesandro, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997)

Tarlo, Emma, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003)