Reconstructing Asian Popular Histories : Problems and Issues of Oral Narratives

By Ratna Saptari

This panel is one of a series of activities that CLARA and the International Institute of Social History is conducting to collect oral narratives from different regions in Asia. Fully supported by the IIAS, three speakers from India, Indonesia and the Netherlands presented their case studies. They were Dr. Chitra Joshi from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, Ms. Ita Nadia from the Indonesian Women's National Commission and Prof. Turaj Atabaki from the International Institute of Social History in the Netherlands.

The scholarly and political attempt to uncover 'history from below' is part and parcel of the attempt to find alternative ways of writing histories. However commendable such an endeavour might be, problems persistently beset oral historians. How do we deal with silences and self-censorship? how do we deal with the interpretation of memories? And how do we subdue our own meanings in people's accounts? Narratives provide us also with a dilemma of reading into collective memories and individual experiences. How do we and should we make distinctions between them to prevent an essentialist 'subaltern history'? These questions were identified as the core problems in the experience of the speakers of this panel.

Recovering Working Women's Voices in India
Chitra Joshi collecting the narratives of working women in Kanpur, a major textile producing area in India, focuses on two problems: how to deal with 'remembering' and 'forgetting' from the individual stories of working class women; and why certain events and categories become markers of time and acquire particular meanings in individual lives. For some women, the experience of caste oppression in the village stands out. This is etched in their memory through the prohibitions on dress imposed on lower castes. Why is this the case? In another example, Joshi brings up the question of how women tend to link particular political events with familial events. For instance, the riots of March 1931 in which hundreds of Muslims and Hindus were killed, become in some stories, markers for an important familial event. They record a moment of birth in the family. Joshi also brought up the issue of the problematic role of the researcher in interpreting contradictory voices. How do researchers distance themselves from their own values and reading of history. In a situation where jobs for men are declining, women's earnings are increasingly important for the survival for working class families. Women recognize the critical significance of their work yet tend to de-valorize it. She questions how we validate such readings of women's stories? Is it ever possible to get away from such dilemmas in dealing with oral sources?

Patterns of Violence in Three Periods in Indonesian History
Ita Nadia, concentrated on the experiences of women who went through the Japanese Occupation 1942; women who were GERWANI (Communist-affiliated Women's Organisation) and rape-victims of the May riots 1998. The choice of the different periods brought with it the realization of the importance of timing and (the nature of) trauma in the collection of women's narratives. The discussion on 'forgetting' as a methodological issue has a different meaning when pain and fear configure women's experiences. The diversity of women's responses to the interviews was brought up by Ita. Interviewing women from different geographical areas, different positions in the organizational structure allows an understanding of the different responses to particular events. 'Forgetting' for the leaders of GERWANI, and for the rank-and-file, for instance, may mean different things. One may forget to suppress unpleasantness, another may forget because of being marginal to an event. Here, an oral historian is wedged between the desire to understand the different responses in narrating events and the need to read history through the experiences of women. The project of writing history often cannot be detached from the desire to understand 'what really happened' and here we are constantly confronted with our own reading of history and research agendas.

Repression, Deportation and Force Labour Migration in Central Asia
Turaj Atabaki, brings up the political and historical context in which forced labour migration occurred in the period between 1920s and 1950s when the Soviet Revolution brought with it radical measures to forestall any threat to the Soviet power base in the process of nation-building and state formation. Forced migration became a central feature to the Stalinist regime. The policy to develop agriculture, industry, mining and the infrastructure brought with it also the need to create a disciplined labour force which could be transported easily from one place to another. About one million peasant households (around five million people) were deported and never heard of again. Forced collectivization of peasants, the Gulag system (concentration camps), population dislocation, were all organized under a system of terror and with the use of force. The attempt to create a single nation-state brought with it the need to attain social homogeneity and political cohesion, and this meant the exclusion and marginalization of smaller ethnic minorities. Within such conjunctures it becomes highly urgent to record the voices of those who have been repressed. And yet the same problems remain, how can we separate the project of 'historical reconstruction' from that of documenting multiple narratives? How do we delve through the layers of suppression, forgetting and silencing, which may come with such experiences?
These questions will indeed remain with us for some time; however the project of documenting such multiple experiences with all its dilemmas, cannot remain hidden and buried.

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