Oral history: the Indian experience

Abstract

It is precisely twenty-nine years back that Professor Allan Nevins, rightly named 'father of oral history' , launched the first oral history programme at Columbia University in the City of New York. Ten years earlier he had made a plea for establishment of an organization for this Purpose in his Gateway to History. It was, however, on 18 May 1948, that he conducted the first oral history inter view for the Columbia Programme. The concept of collection of historical material through a process of interviews recorded on tape wa s an innovation of far-reaching consequence in historical research. Many scholars viewed this new idea with scepticism, questioned its reliability as a research tool , but others accepted it with enthusiasm as a process which promised to provide recollections and reflections of many key figure s in contemporary life which otherwise would be lost to posterity. Oral history gained wide acceptance and within the first quarter century several programmes in emulation of the pioneering Columbia University Project were established by universities, research institutions, historical societies, libraries and museums in U.S.A. The movement also crossed the frontiers of the States, into Canada , United Kingdom and Israel. In 1971 there were over 230 oral history programmes in U.S.A. Their number may be over 300 by now. The first among them at Columbia University remains the largest one and it serve s as a mode l in organization and techniques for most other projects in the field. By the end of 1977, the Oral History Office at Columbia University had interviewed about 3,000 persons and possessed more than 400,000 pages of transcripts of interviews of interest to researchers in humanities and social sciences. The impact of the programme on scholarship can be observed in many published works, based partially or fully, on the material available in the interviews.