Examine the strengths and limitations of oralhistory. How have oral-history techniquesfurthered our understanding of Partition?
Answers
Answer:
. (a) The history of Partition has been reconstructed by the help or oral narratives, memoirs, diaries and family histories. These help to understand the problems faced by ordinary people during this harrowing time.
(b) Oral sources help us to grasp experiences and memories in details. It enables historians to write vivid accounts of what people experienced during partition. It is impossible to extract this kind of information from government documents. Government documents deal with policy matters and may throw ample light on negotiations between the British and other major political parties. But it does not tell us about the day to day experiences of those affected by the partition.
(c) Thus oral history of partition has helped to depict the experiences of those whose existence have been hitherto ignored, who are not rich or have been taken for granted.
(d) However historians have felt that oral data lacks concrete details and the chronology they yield is not precise. Historians feel that oral accounts are concerned with tangential issues and that small individual experiences are irrelevant to the unfolding of the larger canvas of history.
(e) With regard to events like the Indian partition and the German Holocaust there is a lot of information about the suffering that the people faces. By comparing statements, oral or written and by corroborating what they yield with findings from ether sources historians can weight the reliability of piece of evidence.
(f) Different types of sources have to be tapped for answering different types of questions and while government reports can tell us of the number of “recovered” women exchanged by both the countries but it is the women who will tell us about their suffering. But oral data on partition is not easily available. People may not want to talk about what are intensely personal experiences and may many not remember events with accuracy considering the time period which has lapsed.
Answer:
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources