'This, too, is history' : oral history, the 1947 India-Pakistan partition and the risks of archival re-ordering

Abstract

Drawing on interviews from my oral history project focusing on the 1947 India/Pakistan partition, in this article, I critically examine the process through which an individual oral history interview becomes part of an archive. I suggest that this process involves an extraneous stabilising, or re-ordering of meaning. The way we use oral histories that we collect, I argue, risks reinforcing some of the problematic political power-dynamics that oral history has hoped to combat. The process of incorporating an oral history interview into an archive is a process of ordering, ironing out ambiguities of meaning, voice, authorship and authority.