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Keeping alive `history' for `future'

Bruce M. Stave is a historian who has chosen to work with contemporary voices, says Mandira Nayar

Bruce M. Stave has been working for more than 30 years keeping alive voices -- links of the present for the `future'. Recording the voices of people who might never have realised they were part of the `history' -- from workers tackling changes brought in by technology to nuns who have left the order to start out again -- his job is to ensure that they all have a chance to speak. A historian who has chosen to work with contemporary voices, Mr. Stave has been involved with projects like talking to Holocaust survivors, former nuns and the first women to vote in the United States. Author of four books, Mr. Stave is a distinguished professor of History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut where he directs the Center for Oral History. He has conducted a wide variety of oral history projects over four decades and was winner of the New England Association of Oral History's first Harvey Kantor Memorial Award for Outstanding Work in Oral History.

"Oral history is different from oral tradition. India has a rich history of oral tradition. Oral tradition is stories that have been passed down generations. Oral history has a fixed format of a tape and recorded interview. The roots of it started 58 years ago," he explained in the Capital this past week during a lecture tour to India organised by the Public Affairs Section of the US Embassy.

However, the influx from the skies of 24-hour television might manage to capture history in the making, but those images and faces will not be `oral-history' he clarifies. "Those are the sounds of history. What radio or television is doing is quite different from oral history. In oral history you have to research, find the subject. Explain to people what the project is about, get them to agree to be asked questions. Then you tape their sessions, transcribe them. They have the choice to edit or change what they like, then you sign a contract with them to use their stories for research," he says.

A different `source' of history, while oral history is established in the United States, it still has to be accepted as a new form of recording contemporary events in India for posterity. However, institutions like Nehru Memorial Library have been taking small steps to work on this aspect of archiving.

"Nehru Memorial Library is a bit like our Presidential Library. It has all the records of the US Presidents since Hebert. It is history from top down, the history of Governments and Cabinets. I believe Nehru Library is involved with looking at history of the freedom fighters. We also found that there was exciting work being done in this field in Kolkata," says Mr. Stave.

Not content with only the voices from the top while researching the impact of the New Deal, he decided to turn to the experts -- ordinary people -- for the answers.

Moving from an elevator operator at Wall Street to interviewing people about auto-mobiles and throwing in questions about policy, he soon got hooked to asking questions. "Oral history gives you a lot of variety. Academic historians are usually very specific. But with oral history, it gives you a lot many areas. It keeps alive the narrative," he says.

Having travelled to India 37 years earlier to teach as part of the Fulbright's scholars, he in a way not only recorded it, but also witnessed it in many ways. With many memories of the past, he feels that he needs to now record his experience for the future. "When we first travelled to India 37 years ago, it was different. Our family came to see us off at the airport. It was like we were going off to some remote place. But now things have changed. We managed to access the Net and I just left my mobile at the counter. There is this feeling of liveliness in the cities which wasn't there before. We are planning to write an article about it when we get back," he says laughing.

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