FAISALABAD: Questions over the oral history and its significance were raised during a conference in Faisalabad when historian Dr Yaqoob Bangash asked whether history written by “the losers” was as important as that written by “the winners”. He termed the oral historians as lazy, asking whether we are fetishising the past and the narratives passed down to us, commenting that you cannot live in silos.

He was replying to the keynote address of Dr Pashaura Singh from the University of Michigan on the second day of the International Lyallpur History Conference on Tuesday.

During a session on Methodological Diversity to Understand Regional History, Dr Singh said oral history was linked with the tradition, handed down from the past. “It’s much more than the passive conserving of information. As a matter of fact, tradition is the active enlivening of the present through links with the past but centre to the concept of the tradition is memory, especially group memory, passed down through generations.” He said the group memory had found increasing currency among the historians, anthropologists and the mass media, adding that the concept conveyed the dynamic aspect of narration not just a reflection but also the act of recollecting.

“History and memory are as much about repression as suppression as their account creation and reflection. The control of voices on historical knowledge has always been critical. Overtimes meanings shift as various parties assume authority to reinterpret surviving texts and as they do so they silence some voices, privilege others. In constructing regional history, oral history plays an important role in the absence of writing documents about the past.”

Hard questions asked on concluding day of Lyallpur History Conference

The rationale behind the postmodernist historiography is that it sees itself as exposing the working of power in history by showing how rhetorical forms are turned to political ends, Dr Singh said, adding that postmodernists initiate investigation to produce counter-memories to weaken hegemonic stranglehold on sources.

He said written documents emerged from the struggle of memory against forgetting. “The powerful erase those out of power from public consciousness through deliberate process of forgetting. All ancient documents were written on the behalf of the victors not from the perspective of the vanquished.”

Dr Singh called out the colonizers who would use the powerful tool of objective history to control their so-called uncivilising subjects. “When western scholars claim that they understand the non-western texts better than the interpreters from the cultures that produce the text due to scientific objectivity, their claim to objectivity is deeply subjective and arises from an ideology of western domination.”

Dr Yaqoob Bangash in reply quoted British historian and diplomat E.H. Carr who said “the facts speak only when a historian calls on them. It is he who decides which fact to give to the floor, their order or context.” He had also called the facts as fish on the fishmongers table, Dr Bangash said, adding that the idea of subjectivity was always there and it could never be taken out.

“In regional history there is always subjectivity to it. You might be from the region, your parents or partner might be from that region.”

He suggested to the young scholars to study the historian before looking at the facts. He said we had lost track of the identity of the writers of history while looking at only the text.

Dr Bangash said a historian needed to be a historian, declaring that “If you forget your discipline you are in then you are never faithful to what discipline calls you to do”.

To the question of power dynamics and the history being written by the winners, he said, “of course history is written by the winners and the losers but when the losers write history is it equally important as what the winners wrote. He asked why a “small man” should be given importance.

Referring to the “study in a silo”, he referred toLyallpur, saying that we just ignore what was happening around the world at the time when this colony was being set up. “We are flashed with things from political science and regional studies etc. At this conference, we looked back at the past and said ‘how wonderful’, but some of it was good but some of it was very bad actually. It’s nice to hear stories of the older generations but we need to see what’s behind it. Are you fetishising a lot of the past?”

Talking about oral history and historians, Dr Bangash said “People think that oral history is great because you speak to a person and write their story and it’s brilliant. It’s lazy because you have to do a lot of work around it to make sense. My PhD supervisor Dr Judith Brown was very much against oral history. She said you can only use it once you have done all the work around it to understand it”.

Pippa Virdee from De Montfort University, UK, differed from some points raised by Dr Bangash, saying that every generation rewrote the past that’s why history was always written in present

She said the decolonizing agenda had been far more prevalent in the west than the global south. “New technology and social media has really changed things and they opened up the whole spectrum and allowed lots of people to engage and contribute to understanding of the past.” She talked about language, gender and class. She said in recording history there was dominance of Urdu, Hindi and English language that excluded a lot of regional local languages though oral history depended on regional languages. She stressed the importance of women’s in history that was often ignored as well as diversity of perspectives in recording history. Regarding class, she said the Subaltern studies school has made a contribution but it has not had that revolutionary change after 1980s and 1990s but later dissipated.

Pervaiz Vandal spoke on the history of architecture and the question of identity. He was surprised by the question of Pakistani architecture and Islamic architecture asked during the seminars organised by the government in the late 1960s. He said the official history wiped out the architecture of Non-Muslims who lived in Lahore before the partition. He said he and his partner Sajida Vandal faced challenges during their research on Bhai Ram Singh as they faced a backlash from officials for his religion despite his great contribution to Lahore.

Another session on “unveiling historical narratives and key personalities of Lyallpur,” Dr Philippe Zehmisch from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, said Bhagat Singh legacy had been hijacked in the sub-continent as he has been termed a Marxist. “He was an anarchist, neither a Marxist, nor a Leninist.” He added that Singh was portrayed donning a turban in his portraits to portray him as a Sikh, creating his religious identity as a Sikh but he was a secular person. He said Singh’s memory had been wiped out from the official history in Pakistan for having a different identity though he was born in the village that’s a part of Pakistan and he fought against the British rulers.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2024