Childhood and youth are idealised as times for carefree pleasures – with few responsibilities and little impact from the troubled adult world. But as oral historians, we are often asking people to recall memories from their childhood or youth. So we need to consider how the age and perspectives of youth shaped the ways young people observed their world or how they remember it, as well as wondering about what they chose to say about it now. But it is just as important that we consider that memory is shaped in social interactions. We must therefore also consider families and how the conventions and emotions of family relationships shape memory.

This is a reflection on two different types of projects which both drew on the memories of children or young people and each case study shows us aspects of family impacts on memory. One is focussed on an Indian subject and the other on events in Australia. Both projects have asked me to think about what children see around them, what they learn in their families and how they understand it all in their later lives.

My first reflections are on the life history of Smt Kapila Khandvala, (1906-1982), a woman of Bombay, the daughter of a reforming Gujerati eye surgeon who encouraged her in her career as an eminent educator and as an outspoken activist. My next reflections are on research into British testing of nuclear weapons in Central Australia in the mid twentieth century.

I came across Kapilaben as part of a wider project of shared research with Professor Devleena Ghosh at the University of Technology Sydney. We have been tracing connections between Indian and Australian left-wing women activists from the 1930s through to the 1980s. Kapilaben along with Smt Mithan Lam, came to Australia in 1946 as representatives of the AIWC to speak at conferences about women’s rights and about Education for Cultural Understanding in the hostile atmosphere of the Cold War. Kapilaben had already taken the courageous step in 1939 of dissenting from her fellow committee members in the Report on Woman’s Role in a Planned Economy. In this planning process set in train by Jawaharlal Nehru on behalf of Congress, Kapilaben was the only dissenting voice, challenging the failure of the women’s planning committee to propose practical changes. Kapilaben rejected traditional constraints on women and, while valuing national and regional cultures and languages, she sustained the calls for civil equality that she made in this Dissenting Note throughout her life.

In 1962 she became President of the National Federation of Indian Women, serving in that role for five years, then devoting herself to the college in Bombay which was later to bear her name, where Gujarati language and community awareness were taught as well as an academic preparation for further study, including that at the closely associated women’s university at SNDT. These accomplishments might have made her a revered icon of the women’s movements in India, Australia and elsewhere, but there were obstacles to her recognition which are suggested in the ways she is remembered.

Some of the people we were able to interview, like Sarla Sharma, (interviewed on a number of occasions by Devleena Ghosh), were about the same age as Kapila when they knew her as a fellow activist in the campaign to achieve better recognition and pay for professional working women who were nurses or teachers. Sarla’s recorded oral history stressed Kapila’s energy and commitment to the long process of surveying these women and then campaigning within the AIWC for support for them.  Both were frustrated by what they saw as a lack of enthusiasm within the AIWC for professional and working women’s rights and both were active in their respective cities in Delhi and Bombay in the development of the National Federation of Indian Women, which they hoped would be more supportive of professional and working women.

For those who were younger than Sarla, however, Kapila was remembered as more distant. Indira Bharadwaj was the granddaughter of a close friend of Kapilaben, Smt Bellatangadi Mainabai Bhujanga Rao. Indira spoke to me about her memories of Kapila and her grandmother early in 2014. Indira remembered her grandmother to be in many ways a conservative woman, who was nevertheless a strong advocate of education for girls. Smt Mainabai was an active philanthropist, fully involved in the Seva Sadan, caring for and educating orphaned girls (https://sevasadan.org/) and had become president of the suburban branch of the Bombay Presidency Women’s Council. Indira was around 10 or 11 when she met Kapila and her partner CM Trivedi, and, although as a youngster she took little detailed notice, she remembers them well. Kapila was more reserved than CM Trivedi, whom Indira remembers as ‘very warm’, but Indira appreciated that Kapilaben always acknowledged each of her friend’s grandchildren. Smt Mainabai and Kapila were relaxed in each other’s company, sharing many jokes between them as well as their mutual interest in girls’ education. It was clear to Indira that Kapila and CM Trivedi were more left-wing politically than her grandmother, but this difference in politics was another source of warm humour between the older women. Kapilaben and CM travelled in a shiny black car, reflecting perhaps CM Trivedi’s position as Chief Magistrate when Indira first met them, which had a red flag flying on the front with a hammer and sickle on it. Indira’s grandmother would laugh at Kapila’s trips to the USSR, telling her that she was being invited because they were ‘indoctrinating her’, although Indira felt that ‘they were not communists, which is why I think the Russia thing’s stuck in our heads.’ Indira remembers that her grandmother and Kapilaben saw each other often, speaking frequently on the phone, with Kapilaben valuing Smt Mainabai’s knowledge about setting up philanthropic organisations as she and CM were the establishing what was initially called the Sadhana Education Society, eventually renamed as the College of Education which bore Kapila’s name. In a sign of their sustained and affectionate friendship, Kapila continued to visit Indira’s grandmother even after the older woman became frail and housebound.

This memory of Kapila as a steadfast friend but as more reserved that her partner, is confirmed by the Australian Lee Rhiannon, who was a very young woman when she stayed with Kapila and CM Trivedi at Santa Cruz in 1970. She was the daughter of Kapila’s Australian friend, Freda Brown, a fellow left-wing activist in the international women’s movement. Just out of High School, Lee was travelling with confidence because she could stay with her mother’s close friend. She too recalled that although Kapila was unfailingly generous and helpful, she was a reserved person who did not openly display her emotions.  Yet Lee felt the same quality of sustained friendship in Kapila’s long and affectionate correspondence with Freda and then with Lee herself, continuing until just a few years before Kapila’s death in 1982. 

For some young family members, however, there was a complete absence of memories about Kapilaben and her achievements. This obstacle lay in social conventions and as well, without doubt, in personal distress. CM Trivedi had been married at some time before he entered a relationship with Kapilaben, and he had left his wife and young family. As a consequence of the irregular situation, CM Trivedi and Kapilaben did not marry. There are few details surviving of how or why this happened but the outcome was an estrangement between Trivedi and the other members of his family. So there was little contact for CM Trivedi himself and none at all for Kapila with the younger nephews and nieces of the Trivedi family. There is instead an absence of memories among younger members of the family, who might otherwise have been interested in the work that Kapilaben had done.

Not only was there an estrangement between the Trivedi family and C.M. Trivedi and his new partner, but there was also an impact on relations within Kapilaben’s own family. Kapila’s father, T.C. Khandvala, an ophthalmic surgeon, was an active member of the reforming organisation, the Brahmo Samaj. He held strongly liberal views and insisted that his four daughters completed tertiary education before they considered marriage. Yet it became clear that, despite his liberalism, the fact that Kapila lived unmarried with her partner was a challenge for his beliefs. In his 1941 autobiography, My Life Story, he simply said two of his daughters had remained unmarried by their own choice, despite receiving many offers of marriage. He felt the need to explain that her ‘choice was to devote [her] life to the educational and social career [she] had chosen’ without making any reference at all to her choice of a life partner. [p56] Kapila had completed a BA at Bombay University and then taking a scholarship at Ann Arbor College of Michegan University to take an MA in Education then a further degree in Sociology in New York.  As the youngest of the five sisters, Kapila was close – in age and in experiences – to Jyoti Master, the daughter of her oldest sister, Tara, who had married M.A. Master. Jyotiben Master (1922-2015), who would grow up to become a medical doctor, marry H. Trivedi (the brother of CM Trivedi) before becoming well-known as Vice-Chancellor of SNDT University.

In speaking with Jyotiben in January 2015, just months before her death, I found that she was delighted to talk about her aunt Kapila, describing how she had travelled as a young woman with her in 1937 to attend an education conference in Tokyo and then, immediately after, had accompanied her to China to speak in support of that country as it faced Japanese military invasion. Yet Jyotiben reflected as she spoke on how little she had talked about Kapila in the years that followed, despite having such warm and admiring memories of her from her travels as a young person. She explained, that unlike Taraben, her committed Gandhian mother, her aunt Kapilaben had been the most outspoken of the sisters, with ‘socialist leanings.’ Jyotiben believed that Kapila ‘was not a card holder but had all the communist things in her house.’ Yet this political difference seemed less important to Jyotiben than the fact that CM Trivedi was her partner. When I raised his name, Jyotiben became uncomfortable, quickly dismissing my inquiry by insisting that C.M. Trivedi was ‘her FRIEND!’ – with her emphasis indicating that this was all he was. She then turned quickly to lengthy discussions of other topics including her own projects at SNDT and the importance in her view of the increasing confidence the University imparted to its women students.

It seems that the absence of memory about the remarkable achievements of Kapilaben has a number of contributing factors. The memories of young people suggest that Kapila’s own reserved personality must have maintained some distance between her and others. Family estrangement meant that although some young relations may have grown up to be interested in Kapilaben’s work, they were simply not in touch with her and may have been deterred by family discomfort from pursuing her work. Finally, even young people like Jyotiben who had closer relationships with Kapilaben when young, may have been separated from her in later years by social conventions about marriage or the lack of it.

Such gaps and distortions in memory are not limited to any one society, although they may take different forms in each. In my Australian family, for example, one of my mother’s siblings divorced when I was a child and, although no criticisms were ever voiced in my hearing, the subtle innuendos of all my family’s references were that the family member was blameless in this separation and the faults rested solely with the other party. I later came to realise that this was very far from the truth, but my changed understanding was accidental. Without such accidents, my misapprehension might have continued forever.

Still other factors obstructed recognition of Kapilaben’s work, like the inaccessibility of the Mumbai Education Department archives. Even the three factors sketched above, suggested by the memories of young people, might have limited knowledge about her. There may, however, have been another process involved, related to the political affiliations of activists in events of intense significance in community life. For Indians, this can be seen in the struggle for Independence, which had continued for so many decades before the final departure of the British in 1947 – and which continues to live with such vivid power in the imaginations of Indians to this day. During the Quit India campaign, led by Mahatma Gandhi, for example, many people sacrificed liberty and faced imprisonment to demand an end to colonialism. Yet there were many Indians, affiliated to the Communist Party, who were not active in the Gandhian Quit India movement but instead advocated a United Front with the British for the duration of the second World War in order to defeat Fascism. While these positions were eventually to be reconciled because all groups fought for Independence, just with different strategies, the rifts and bitterness of that difficult struggle continues to live on into the present.

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This question – about memories of deeply-felt events – is relevant in an example from my work in oral history in Australia.  The British government tested nuclear weapons with fission explosions in two desert sites in South Australia in the 1950s. The initial test was two detonations in 1953 at Emu Junction, in the north east of the state, then a series of 6 explosions in 1956 and 1957 at Maralinga, in the south of the state.

Over many decades, Aboriginal people voiced their concerns about the effects of the testing on their health and on the environment. Finally, as a result of these sustained Aboriginal demands for investigation as well as the concerns of Australian military veterans, an Australian Royal Commission to inquire into the testing effects was established in 1984. I was living in the north of South Australia at that time, after completing my doctoral studies in oral history with Aboriginal people in the eastern state of New South Wales, so I was employed by the Pitjantjatjara Council to assist its legal team, acting on behalf of Aboriginal populations across the region, as they prepared evidence from the Aboriginal testimony to put before the Royal Commission. My work was mainly concerned with memories about the Emu tests in 1953.

The Pitjantjatjara Council mobilised a team of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal linguists, anthropologists and historians, including myself, to make a careful analysis of the testimonies from a number of communities. It became clear that the narrative from one particular community, to the north of the Emu site, where there had been many tragic deaths, was different in detail to that from other communities further to the east. Internal evidence from the testimonies of this one community showed that their memories were associated with events which could only have occurred in 1948, which was some years before the nuclear testing had begun. What had occurred in 1948, however, had been a severe viral epidemic, caused by measles, to which the members of this remote community had had no immunity. The narratives from the other communities to the east, where Aboriginal people also recalled illnesses, included as well sightings of a series of visual phenomena consistent with the airborne radiation cloud, as well as having internal details which were more clearly associated with events around 1953.

The 1948 viral measles epidemic had been poorly described to this westerly community by attending non-Aboriginal staff, and because it was unprecedented and could not be explained by traditional understandings of illness and death, community members worried about it over many years. When later they were told – again in poorly expressed and confusing descriptions – about the nuclear testing, it was not surprisingly that this testing had become associated with the stories of unexplained deaths.

It appeared then that the events at the more westerly community were most likely associated with the measles epidemic, rather than with the atomic testing which had affected the more easterly communities. The legal team needed advice from the westerly community about whether their evidence should be led at the Royal Commission. This was a very hard decision – the community had to decide whether to forsake the opportunity to tell the story of the tragedy of 1948 which had left such a terrible burden of grief and anger.

A large community gathering was held, in which the majority of participants were elderly people who had lived through the awful period of death. As well, however, there were a number of younger people who were the sons and daughters of survivors of the sickness who had since died. These younger people had been told the story by their deceased elders over the years when the episode of deaths had been thought to have been caused by the nuclear testing. The legal team and advisers like myself, some Aboriginal and some non-Aboriginal, spent time at this meeting explaining the grounds for the legal team’s concerns about this community’s evidence. After many hours of discussion, questioning and then more discussion, those present who had themselves experienced and survived the period of illness and deaths, came to individual and collective conclusions that their memories were associated with the 1948 measles viral epidemic. The many dimensions of this complex discussion and its conclusion have been recorded in the Report of the Royal Commission and in various publications about the inquiry.

But there was one group of people who were not happy with this view. They were the people whose deceased relatives had been survivors of the illness and had told their children and young relations about it when they had believed it was associated with the atomic testing. The people who had themselves gone through the terrible illness and witnessed the scenes of death and grief had been able to consider the various interpretations that had been made and revise their views. Those who had not themselves witnessed the events but had instead been told about them by their loved but deceased relations did not feel comfortable departing from the narrative they had been given. To have questioned the explanation of their elder relations seemed to be a betrayal of the trust placed in them. These people deferred to the views reached at the meeting by the elderly, living survivors, whose authority could not be questioned on this matter, but it clearly left deep disquiet and unease to have acceded to the decision to leave this narrative out of the presentation to the Royal Commission.

This burden of guilt did not ease over time. People in the westerly community from this generation – the children of survivors who later died – continued to feel they had let down the elders they loved, who had trusted them to keep the memory of the tragedy and grief alive. It was invariably people of this generation who were occasionally heard through the 1990s and 2000s, repeating the accounts they had been told by their parents, of deaths caused by the bombs, as they tried to fulfil the responsibilities with which they felt they had been entrusted. Most from that generation have now themselves passed away. What has continued have been the narratives from the easterly communities, which could consistently attribute illness and contamination to the 1953 nuclear testing. It is telling that it is now the children of those easterly survivors who can confidently sustain the challenge to the British military and scientific establishment that they failed to protect Aboriginal people – and indeed any Australian people and environments – from the poison of their weapons tests.

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How might these reflections about memories of extreme events in Australia, and their effect on the next generation, be relevant to memories in India? As an Australian historian with limited experience and even less expertise in the rich histories of India, I would be foolish to make definitive assertions. But for all of us, the struggles of the recent past – and in particular those which have demanded great sacrifice and led to so much grief, like warfare and independence struggles – remain very much alive in the present. The burdens of responsibility felt by younger generations to celebrate the sacrifices made by their old and deceased relations in heroic struggles must be very heavy, no matter how willingly they are embraced. As others have noted, the narrative of defining moments of national history become simplified in the retelling, with contending groups vying for control of the story. Recent Indonesian history, for example, is replete with accounts of leaders claiming – sometimes falsely – to have been freedom fighters in the iconic Battle of Surabaya. So I am left wondering how the bitter differences over strategies to gain Independence in India might still play out. Are there still differences, for example, between the who took part in the Quit India campaign – those who were imprisoned and injured by the British – and those who did not, notably the communists who argued that a united front with the Allies was necessary to defeat Fascism first, before turning to rid India of British colonialism. These differing strategies may all have aimed at the same result but they were deeply painful differences at the time, none the less. How do they shape the memories about those like Kapila Khandvala, who fought against colonialism all her life, but chose a strategy aligned with that of the Communist Party of India during the Independence struggle? Do the strategic differences of the 1940s continue to shape the way later generations of those courageous freedom fighters, on all sides, recount the struggle?

And what do we then learn about the memories of people who were children or very young at the times they are remembering? From these examples, I suggest children’s memories are extremely important because they are sensitive to the emotional dimensions of interactions – the warmth or the reticence in the demeanour of the people they recall, rather than the details of what they did or said. They remember styles of interactions – warmth, jokes, constancy and – as Indira’s memories about Kapila and Russia suggest – the contradictions and puzzles stand out in memory. But it is also important that the exposure that children have to others is entirely the result of family relations – so if families are estranged, children will have little contact or only the hints of criticism or demeaning innuendo or outright family hostility to shape their memories. Through their storytelling, families reinforce the enjoyable times they shared, so these loom larger in children’s imagination than less happy times. Where there are misrepresentations, they may show more clearly in the memories of adults, as they were in T.C. Khandvala’s memoirs or the insistence on terms like ‘her friend’ by Jyotiben Trivedi to cover discomfort about her aunt’s irregular relationship. Such discomfort might disappear in the memories of children, who have only absences and gaps where otherwise memories might have been. Yet it may significantly shape their orientation towards the people about whom they are asked.

And finally, the example from Australia suggests that young people do indeed carry memories from their elders – but not in any simple way. Instead, they carry responsibilities to protect and pass on intact the stories of sacrifice and grief exactly as their elders told it – leaving them inflexible and resistant to alternative explanations as they uphold the trust they feel has been placed in them. These are noble impulses – but there are costs too.

No-one talks at all any more about the tragedy of the measles in central Australia….. 

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Heather Goodall is an award-winning author who has published on Indigenous histories and environmental history in Australia, on twentieth century decolonisation in India and Australia and on maritime history in the eastern Indian Ocean. She has drawn on oral history methodology in all these fields, including her co-authored works with Indigenous activists Isabel Flick and Kevin Cook. Growing up near Salt Pan Creek, a tributary of the Georges River, Heather has analysed river environmental history and politics in rural and remote areas as well as in cities. Her recent books include Beyond Borders: Indians, Australians and the Indonesian Revolution, 1939-1950 (Amsterdam University Press, 2018); Teacher for Justice: Lucy Woodcock’s Transnational Life, co-authored with Helen Randerson and Devleena Ghosh (ANU Press, 2019) and most recently, Georges River Blues: swamps, mangroves and resident action, 1945-1980, (ANU Press, 2021). As Professor Emerita of History, at the University of Technology Sydney, Heather continues her work as an activist researcher.  

This is the story of a research project that was abandoned. It’s also the story of my love-hate relationship with my first research project and, for lack of a better word, the failure to execute it. After living with this project for the first two years of my doctoral program, when I realised that I couldn’t continue working on this project anymore I wrote a conference paper to bury its memories. Then it took me three more years to revisit this project and to write this blogpost. The problematics I discuss here are not the reasons why I abandoned the project for dealing with these challenges would have only enriched my research. The reasons for abandoning the project were personal but I cannot deny that some of the anxieties that I bring up here were tangled with the reasons for not working on the project.

This now-in-box project aimed to trace the history of an industrial “new town” of India, Durgapur, though the personal life stories of its residents. These industrial new towns were purposely built from scratch after India’s independence to propel the country into “modernity” after centuries of British colonial rule. Durgapur was envisioned as one such place. I was working on a project to record the growth of this new town that was powered by hydroelectricity and steel and its transition into a city with global links through intergenerational interviews.

My ethics application at the university read something like this:

“In newly independent India, people from surrounding regions moved to the city for jobs… Along came educational initiatives and facilities of technical and vocational training of the youth for their employment in the factories. Over the past sixty years of its existence, the city has grown manifold and its population has doubled. Several of the industries have undergone the cycle of growth, closure and revival.

Since the 1990s, with the liberalisation of Indian economy and the sudden growth in the information and communication technology industry in India, the city has undergone a transformation. Many of the second or third generation of the families that had once moved to the city in search of jobs have now moved out of there and settled in the IT and finance capitals of the world….”

When I think back at why I chose to work on this project, it was because I thought I understood this city in a personal way. I knew people who lived there as family and friends. The city was nothing like where I had grown up and it made me curious. I thought it would be easy to reach out to people for interviews and that I will be able to hold an insider’s view of the place. Well, I was soon to find out that belongingness is always negotiated and lines between insiders and outsiders are fuzzy if not indeterminable.

Before I get into my anxieties about the project, I need to provide a little background to how I came to think of myself as an insider there. I am not from Durgapur. My former partner grew up and went to school there. The family has a connection with the city that dates back to its early years. I have heard dida, the grandmother, talk about the visit of Queen Elizabeth-II to the town in 1961. I grew up in Assam and in Uttar Pradesh, but my mother tongue is Bengali. My connection with Durgapur developed through my former partner. It was a place where we had friends and family; a place to escape to during holidays. I felt at home there in a way that I hadn’t felt in any city before that. You see, I have always lived a linguistically fractured life. Bengali was the language at home but when I stepped out, it was either Assamese, Hindi and English; later it was Kannada and now it’s French. I never formally learnt to read or write Bengali. I’ve always had to connect with the world in a different language than the one I connected with at home and with family. My friendships and work were always in Hindi and English and negotiating with the world was always a mosaic of languages.

Durgapur felt different. I did not have to slip in and out of languages. Just speaking Bengali would do. Steel towns, such as Durgapur, were assembled by bringing in technological know-how and expertise from across India. Engineering professionals, doctors, educators and administrators, who moved to the town in the early years, had diverse linguistic background but settled in, often picking up the local language, and always shared the language of science and technology. That, and with Hindi and English for official correspondences and archival work, I thought I was well-equipped. And with family connections, I very quickly assumed I had an insider status.  Familiarity with the city had made me curious about its past and its future. I often wondered about people’s connection to the place. It seemed Durgapur’s residents, wherever they went, had a shared sense of identity that came from many different things— going to the same school, working at the same place, or living in the same neighbourhood, and memories of festivals, celebrations, shops and people. And they also shared a present through their connections with other places. If one of two generations of a family had lived and worked in the steel and power plants of Durgapur, and its ancillary industries, the young generation that was leaving the city was coalescing elsewhere, in the IT hubs and financial capitals of the world. A significant number of families that had a member or two working in the industrial plants in Durgapur, also had a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister in Bengaluru, Boston or some such place. While the past of the city was shaped around India’s temples of modernity, as the iron and steel industries and dams and power plants were once described by the country’s first Prime Minister, the future was clearly linked to the Silicon Valley. In the fifty years or so of its existence, fortunes of this city had waxed and waned. Memories of industry closures, labour unrest and unemployment were as much a living history as the early years of growth, development and prosperity. My interest was to engage with some of these apparently opposing dynamics through oral history interviews with long-term residents of the city and the young generation that had moved elsewhere but still had a connection with the place.

• 

Where do I stand?

As a wife, daughter-in-law and friend, I had access to my potential research participants’ private lives. Stacey Zembrzycki (2009), in her work in Sudbury’s Ukranian community, writes about negotiating her grandmother’s friendships and relationships while doing oral history interviews. For Zembrzycki, her grandmother became an ally in her research. My situation was somewhat similar. Dida seemed to know everyone in the city, and she would introduce me to her friends and acquaintances, both as a member of the family and as a researcher. Conversations about my research topic unfolded in very personal ways, between personal stories and while building and maintaining personal relationships.

In Durgapur, when I spoke Bengali, people were amused. As I worked my way through the Bengali newspaper in the morning, dida couldn’t help but smile. I realized I had very compartmentalized uses of languages. In linguistics, it’s called “code-switching”. In her study of an all-male card playing club, Anna de Fina (2007) illustrates how language can determine and is used to negotiate insider/outsider identities. I switched languages— Bengali helped me to show a connect with the place and its people; English pronounced my researcher identity.

One of the long-standing concerns of oral history theory has been about devolving the power of the researcher in the field through collaborative practices and a shared language that would allow research participants to speak for themselves in the research project (Miller, Little & High, 2017). In Durgapur, though I literally spoke the region’s language, my origin and my status as a foreign university-based researcher made me an outsider. And my Bengali had its limits. Personal relationships to the place and people further complicated things. The researcher in me had to constantly negotiate these relationships, which could both open and close doors. As a woman from a particular household, I inherited the family’s social relationships, which if it worked to my advantage in establishing contacts, also wrapped me in social expectations that I couldn’t just shake off. I remember the day I realized it was going to be a difficult to do research in Durgapur. Dida took me to visit an old friend, someone who had moved to Durgapur when the town was still coming into being.

I was introduced as the daughter-in-law of the family and dida’s friend noted my clothes – I was not wearing a sari – and the absence of jewellery on my body. Though unintentional, I was breaking a social norm there and it bordered on disrespect towards others— the family and their friends. Meanwhile, the comment angered me. I have no particular fondness for jewellery. And let’s just be frank here— a sari is not as comfortable as a salwar kurta on a hot summer afternoon. And I was too preoccupied with the prospect of meeting a potential research participant to pay attention to my other identity as the bau-ma or the daughter-in-law and the woman of the household.

The comment had set me back more than I realised at that moment. Throughout the afternoon, I barely asked any questions though the two old friends spent a couple of hours reminiscing the old days. And it wasn’t out of shyness towards fieldwork for I had done a fair amount of oral history work in India before that. I almost felt paralysed by the social norms that I was being asked to navigate. Could I have put on my researcher’s hat or would that have been considered a transgression? I wish I had pushed through. But as a researcher, I had felt powerless as my other social identity, as woman, a daughter-in-law, and a family-friend took up all the space. I hadn’t imagined that my research could be challenged by my personal relationships to this extent. I am sure if I had returned to the conversation another day and all by myself, I would have had regained some control of the situation. But that never happened, and I will always wonder what stories would have come from such an interaction.

Family and the field

By the time this incident took place, my research question had crystallized around gender and class divide that seemed to be at the core of the organisational logic of Durgapur. The Grand Trunk Road runs through its heart with the industrial area is to one side of the highway and the residential areas and markets concentrated on the other side. Durgapur’s development was predicated on hydroelectricity production, steel plants, heavy machineries and chemical fertilizer factories. N. Vijay Jagannathan (1987), in a study of Durgapur’s growth and sprawl over the years, notes how urban planning of the township was overwritten as the town developed into an important urban center for trade and commerce. The wide roads and spacious houses of the planned township, organised in blocks around sectoral markets, are now interspersed with dense clusters of buildings that developed around market areas.

Class was scripted into the plan of the place as senior officer residences were separated from workers quarters. Having the family at the center of my research worked both ways. I am not sure I would have had access to a lot of the knowledge about the place without them, but they also shaped my research practices in ways that I couldn’t control. There were pockets of abandoned school buildings, factories and residential areas where wild vegetation had taken over the space. If there were busy markets packed with shops, cars and people, there were also sleepy areas where not even a bird flapped its wings on a summer afternoon. Old quarters that were built as per the plans of architects Joseph Allen Stein and Benjamin Polk had been modified to suit the residents’ needs. I met families that had lived and worked in Durgapur for more than a generation. Then there were families that had moved to the city for work and never left. There were others who lived in the industrial townships and rural towns around Durgapur, for whom the city was a lifeline— for education, healthcare, consumer goods and a connect with the rest of the world.    

Given these industries employed a predominantly male workforce, the city also seemed spatially gendered. There were spaces of production and then there were spaces of social reproduction. Most of my interactions with people were limited to the side of the highway where life unfolded outside the factories. On a rare drive to the part of Durgapur where the industries are located, I was accompanied by the whole family. It was like a small celebration of the past. When I stepped out of the car to take photos, someone always stepped out with me and I often felt everyone’s eyes on me— for being a woman, for being an outsider, for being the person who was taking pictures of a place that by no means was a tourist spot. In the old days, dida said, there were buses that brought workers to the plants. Women occasionally used bicycles and it was rare enough to be noted in memories of “those days”. Now, Durgapur runs on cars, two-wheelers, and rickshaws. If it were not for the family, I would perhaps not have access to many parts of the city. And it just so happened that whenever I wanted to step out, someone always accompanied me. It did make me feel more secure though it shaped my interactions with the place too. People I had never met before welcomed me into their life for my connection to the family.

My previous experience of interviewing for oral history projects at the Centre for Public History in Bengaluru had taught me that gender, class and caste can influence conversations— they could create opportunities or prove to be impediments. Alessandro Portelli (2018) writes that the interviewer and the interviewee both play the role of the observer and the observed in the interview interchangeably. At interviews, I was always observed – through questions about my family, education, etc. – before I was allowed to ask my questions. In the end, the success of my interviews depended a lot on being able to successfully negotiate the gender, caste and class norms, which shaped our interactions. In Durgapur, a new layer of complexity was added to the situation because of my personal connection to the place. It also meant that this piece of personal connection to my research coloured my perspective. The family’s stories were shaping my research questions, just as the relationships were defining my research practice.

Lisa Ndejuru (in Miller, Little & High, 2017), talks about her collaborative work with the Rwandan community in Montreal, relates an incident when she was trying to encourage people in the community to talk as part of a playback theatre initiative. She realised that she had to “talk” in order for people to understand why they should talk and then decide if they wanted to talk. It meant making herself vulnerable first if she was asking that from her participants. While her research unfolds in the very particular context of people affected by mass violence, the lesson learnt is at the core of oral history practice. For me, doing an oral history project in a place where I had family and friends meant I had to let go of my carefully constructed self of a university-based researcher and open myself to people’s gaze that fell on my personal life as much as my research. This needed work because no amount of readings on research methodologies could prepare me for this.

Was I ready to listen?

Portelli (2018) writes that seeing and listening to the other person in the interview space is key. The oral history interview is a conversation that unfolds between two people through a reciprocation of interests as both parties bring their agendas to the interview space. What did this mean for me in a research context where my identity was shaped by my personal relationships above else? I did not have control over how I would be received by people and whether I would ever be able to establish myself as a researcher over my other social identity. But on my part, was I bringing too much to the table?

My introduction to Durgapur was through the family. I already had in mind some of the stories that I wanted to hear more about. What would that have precluded? Dida had told me stories about her childhood and her early days in Durgapur. In a way, her stories were my stories. Her history has shaped me as a woman. I had been brought up on similar stories from my grandmother and mother. They spoke of aspirations and experiences that never found expression in public life. These stories were told in the kitchen, in between domestic chores, always meant to remain just that— stories. Some stories angered me but, as family, I also couldn’t ignore the serenity and forbearance with which she and the women in my family had talked about these events and experiences. They brought up matters very close to my heart, things that I could link back to my own growing up as a girl and to how my life was shaped by these gendered social norms ­and expectations. I had an insider’s agenda in looking for the stories that I was looking for. What would I have done with those stories? Was I ready to listen or was I too angry to see the other person’s interests in telling me those stories? The search for distance, here, was not about an objective point-of-view but about giving space to the other person’s subjective self to unfold and shape the narrative.

There was a dilemma here. I was going to tap into a network of family and friends where relationships had already been established and it had nothing to do with my identity as a researcher. As a family member or friend, I was privy to a lot more than what was likely to be allowed in public. There are differences of opinion with family and friends, intimate details about private lives, and hopes and dreams that never find expression in public. To me, who was familiar with the social norms and codes of behaviour, it seemed like a betrayal if I were to bring up some of those matters on record. According to Alexander Freund (in Sheftel and Zembrzycki eds., 2013), oral historians have a tendency to want to fill out silences with words to give the oppressed an opportunity to register their voices and yet silences, like lies, secrets and deflections, serve important purposes in communicating meaning. Would it have been fair to bring up matters that were important to me as a researcher, but my research participants did not necessarily want to address or bring up in the interviews? Was I to question what they were willing to tell me in the interview against what, I thought, needed to be told?

As a student of oral history and all the discussions around sharing authority in research and collaborative practice in the field, it seemed like the wrong thing to do— to push my agenda on them. I realized that if I were to continue working on this project, I had to have a more open mind about where this project would take me. It made me ask: When are stories worth telling in public? There is no one answer but it’s definitely worth a question engaging with in oral history research.

A version of this blogpost was presented as a paper at the 2018 Annual Conference of OHS and OHNI on “Dangerous Oral Histories: risks, responsibilities and rewards” in Belfast.

Piyusha Chatterjee is a PhD candidate in an interdisciplinary program at Concordia University in Montreal. Her doctoral research investigates the place of the busker in the political economy of Montreal using oral histories and archival research. Her research interests include oral history, labour in the postindustrial/cultural economy, informal work and the working poor in the Global North and Global South. Before returning to school for her doctoral studies, she worked with newspapers in India for eight years. She was introduced to oral history when she started working as a curator with the Centre for Public History at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology. 

References

Abrams, L. 2010. Oral History Theory. London: Routledge.

De Fina, A. 2007. “Code-switching and the construction of ethnic identity in a community of practice,” Language in Society 36: 371–392.

Jagannathan, N. V. 1987. “Planning in New Cities: The Durgapur Experience,” Economic and Political Weekly, 22(13): 553-558.

Miller, E., E. Little and S. High. 2017. Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Portelli, A. 2018. “Living Voices: The Oral History Interview as Dialogue and Experience,” The Oral History Review 45(2): 239–248.

Sheftel, A. & S. Zembrzycki. 2013. Oral History Off the Record: An Ethnography of Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Zembrzycki, S. 2009. “Sharing Authority with Baba”, Journal of Canadian Studies 43(1): 219–238.