Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No.

4 December 2012
DOI: 10.1111/johs.12000

Between Craft and Method: Meaning and

Inter-subjectivity in Oral History Analysis

MAHUA SARKAR*

Abstract1 This paper has three overarching aims: to contextualise oral history
within larger debates over methods in the social sciences; to highlight the peculiar
strengths as well as complexities of oral history as a method; and finally to elucidate
some of these methodological issues through insights drawn from analysis of oral
histories of two elderly Bengali Muslim women.

Introduction
Oral history may be defined as in-depth biography interviewing,
typically of people who are excluded from or marginalised within
conventional historical accounts. The aim is to capture the ways in
which a respondent gives meaning to his/her life experiences
through a detailed narrative. It is particularly useful in illuminating
how people relate to aspects of social life, or a major event. Con-
sequently, oral history has been often used in studies of genocides,
wars, migration, histories of working class communities, the
elderly, and of course in the field of womens history (Perks and
Thomson, 2006; Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2004, 142144).
This paper consists of four sections: in the first two, I briefly
contextualise oral history within larger debates over methods in the
human sciences; the third section highlights specific strengths of
oral history as a method, as well as some of the complexities that
are typically involved in this kind of analysis; in the final section of
the paper I draw on my own research on Muslim women in late
colonial Bengal2 to illustrate some of the methodological discus-
sions I outline in the paper.

Debates over Methods

The dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the West since
their inception in the nineteenth century has been Positivism,
which insists that scientific explanations take the general form if
A then B or more elaborate (including probabilistic and multivari-
ate) versions of these constant conjunctions identified by David
Hume (Steinmetz, 2005, 32; Collier, 2005, 328; Lawson, 2005).3
The ontological assumption underlying such an approach to

* Mahua Sarkar is Associate Professor at Binghamton University at the

Dept of Sociology and Asian and Asian American Studies.

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA
02148, USA.
 Between Craft and Method 579

regularity determinism is that the natures of A and B as objects are

such that they are always knowable in specific ways. Classical
positivists, guided by empiricist ontology, would thus consider
the nature of A and B as always apprehensible by the senses
(Steinmetz, 2005, 32).
By the 1960s, however, the positivist paradigm was coming under
increasing attack in the West as inadequate, if not highly problem-
atic, especially for the study of human interactions. At the heart of
this critique was both an increased scepticism about the idea and
ideal of objectivity, (Novick, 1988; Ross, 1991; Megill, 1994),4 and
a growing dissatisfaction with a set of dualisms that marked
the positivist epistemology, such as the assumed divides between
the subject and the object, the rational and the emotional, and the
abstract and the concrete (Krieger, 1985; Sprague and Zimmerman,
2004). Critics, especially in the social sciences, repeatedly pointed
out that social meaning is not a given, but a dynamic product of
interaction. There was, therefore, a perceived need for both greater
self-reflexivity on the part of the researcher, and the inclusion of
multiple voices/standpoints in writing (Sprague and Zimmerman,
2004; Hartsock, 1998; Harding, 1992; Stacey, 1991; Personal Nar-
ratives Group, 1989; Krieger, 1985).
This increasing dissent against the positivist mode of scholar-
ship, however, has been largely marginalised or perhaps contained
within U.S. sociology. To quote George Steinmetz, it seems that
sociology in the U.S. has remained

. . . almost pristinely aloof from these battles . . . Epistemological questioning and

self-reflexivity are still rare in the pages of the main sociology journals in the United
States, suggesting a discipline that is secure in its scientific identity and assump-
tions. In the leading journals and the curricula of the leading departments, explicitly
non-positivist positions are only tentatively articulated, with the exception of a few
subfields such as the sociology of science and culture and ethnic and minority
studies. U.S. sociology still seems to be operating according to a basically positivist
framework, perhaps a crypto-positivist one (2005, 276).

One discipline that has been instrumental in advancing critical

interventions against the positivist approach and which, in my
opinion, is particularly important for debates within oral history
is cultural anthropology (Stocking, 2001; Keane, 2005; Steinmetz,
2005, 5). Mainly two kinds of changes have resulted from the efforts
of anthropologists engaged in debates over methods: a greater focus
on the fieldwork encounter as the site of the inter-subjective pro-
duction of facts (Crapanzano, 1977; Rabinow, 1977) and an
increasing awareness that ethnographies are not objective repre-
sentations of reality, but, like all forms of knowledge, situated
products of specific dialogic contexts. The latter shift, most

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famously represented in the collection, Writing Culture: the Poetics

and Politics of Ethnography (1986), has resulted in a conscious
effort to produce dialogic or poly-vocal ethnographies that high-
light the voices of the subjects thereby de-centering the role of the
researcher as the chief, if not the only, narrator (Clifford and
Marcus, 1986; Abu-Lughod, 1990).
Feminists meanwhile have long contended that there is a link
between objectivity and dominance, and that there is an affinity
and relatedness among objectivity, scholarly discourse, men,
and the apparatuses of ruling (Griffin, 1978; Smith, 1987; Abu-
Lughod, 1990; Stacey, 1991). Feminist anthropologists, for
instance, have pointed at the self/other dichotomy at the heart of
anthropology as a historical locus for the articulation of unequal
power relationsbetween those who are studied and those who do
the studying. As they have argued, this power relation needs to be
unpacked (Abu-Lughod, 1990; Visweswaran, 2003).
The critique of objectivity seems to have led to roughly two kinds
of responses among feminist scholars: some have denounced objec-
tivity altogether, calling instead for a privileging of the subjectivity
of women (Farganis, 1986; MacKinnon, 1982; Sprague and Zim-
merman, 2004); while a second, perhaps more useful, approach
has argued that all knowledge is partial and stems from an embod-
ied perspective (Abu-Lughod, 1990). Beginning with the insight
that it is possible to understand the workings of social structures
through the study of womens practical, everyday experiences
(Smith, 1979; Hartsock, 1998; Collins, 1989), feminists have
argued that gender intersects with other structures such as class,
race, and ethnicity or caste, religion, sexuality in other
contextsto produce distinct perspectives that can serve as alter-
native ways of knowing (Collins 1989; King, 1988; Personal Narra-
tives Group, 1989; Geiger, 1996). In this understanding, womens
points of view are privileged because, like any subaltern view, it
cannot pretend to be a view from nowhere. To quote Sandra
Harding,

. . . standpoint methods are engaged. They are not dispassionate, disinterested,

distanced, value-free. It takes politics as well as science to see beneath, behind, or
through the institutional rules and practices that have been designed to serve
primarily the already more economically, [socially] and politically advantaged groups
(2004, 73).

And it is precisely this situated view that feminists would like a

redefined idea of objectivity to reflect (Haraway, 1988; Harding,
2004). Such a reworked notion of objectivity would also be robust
or strong, and could be applied to both the context of discovery
(i.e. the origin of research questions) and the context of justifica-

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 Between Craft and Method 581

tion (i.e. the processes through which research questions are

tested). As Sprague and Zimmerman explain,

The context of justification is subject to rationalization and control through the

procedural rule of the scientific method. Positivistic assumptions cannot, however,
rationalize or account for the context of discovery, the seemingly idiosyncratic and
mysterious process through which research questions and creative, novel hypoth-
eses emerge (2004, 42).

In other words, the question of objectivity within the positivist

approach enters into the discussion after one has already chosen a
research topic, and the subjects. It does not require the researcher
to reveal or even reflect upon his/her choice of a particular topic,
thereby eliding crucial questions regarding how power is deployed
in the research process already in the selection of research prob-
lems, and the way in which the researcher as subject is placed
outside/above the process. In contrast, the feminist standpoint
approach proposes that methodological scrutiny be applied to the
context of discovery as well, so that the ways in which a dominant
groups values and interests typically influence which research
projects are considered legitimate and, hence, fundable, might be
made transparent (Harding, 2004, 73).

The Oral History Debates

Needless to say, developments similar to those discussed above
have marked oral history research as well in the course of the past
few decades.
In an important recent article, Alistair Thomson has identified a
number of paradigm transformations since oral history, in its
contemporary form, surfaced in the Anglo-American academy at
the end of World War II (Thomson, 2007). Of course, oral history is
far from new. As British oral historian Paul Thompson points out,
as late as the mid-nineteenth century historians routinely drew on
oral traditions as valuable source of historical information. In
Thompsons words,

. . . oral history is as old as history itself. It is the first kind of history. And it is only
quite recently that skill in handling oral evidence has ceased to be one of the marks
of a great historian . . . (who would typically have) distinct ideas about the areas in
which oral evidence was more, or less, reliable (Thompson, 2000, 2526).

But the emergence and consolidation of history as an academic

discipline in the nineteenth century and the embracing of the idea
that historians work only with documents There is no substitute
for documents: no documents, no history . . . (Langlois and Sei-

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582 Mahua Sarkar

gnobos, 1908, 17)had led to a steady marginalisation, if not dis-

missal of oral evidence as unreliable over time (Thompson, 2000).
In the post World War II era, oral history once again gained
importance as more historians began to see memory as an impor-
tant resource for historical research, especially as a way of
recording the history of ordinary working people, with initial
links to folklore studies. But it was in the context of the rise of
social history in the 1960s, with its commitment to enlarging the
scope of historical study to include categories of people who had
previously been ignored by historical scholarship (Sewell Jr.,
2005, 177) that oral history seems to have found its footing.5
This is the first paradigm shift within the field of oral history
that Thomson identifies in his article (Thomson, 2007, 5152;
Thompson, 2000).
The early career of oral history was, however, far from conflict
free. Throughout the 1970s and beyond, the conservative history
establishment in the west criticised oral history for its use of
memory as resource: the claim being that memory was easily
distorted and hence an unreliable source for historical informa-
tion (Tuchman, 1972; Powell, 1981). What is more, politically-
committed social historians, as well as some oral historians them-
selves, also criticised the nave use of memory (Hobsbawm, 1988),
the inadequate understanding of the complex relationship between
individual reminiscence and dominant histories, and a tendency
towards facile democratization and complacent populism that
marked many oral history projects of that time (Passerini, 1998;
Popular Memory Group, 1998).6 In response, oral historians took a
number of crucial post-positivist turns that together constitute the
second important paradigm shift in the field. Scholars now began to
argue that

. . . the so-called unreliability of memory was also its strength, and the subjectivity
of memory provided clues not only about the meanings of historical experience, but
also about the relationships between past and present, between memory and
personal identity, and between individual and collective memory (Thomson, 2007,
54).7

Increasingly, oral historians stressed both the specific strengths of

oral history and the need to see memory as not simply a method
but also the subject of oral history (Thomson, Frisch and Hamil-
ton, 1994; Summerfield, 1998, pp. 1718).
If the rise of social history framed the context for oral historys
early development in the 1960s, it is safe to say that the cultural
turn within history, which began in the 1980s and crested in the
1990s (Eley, 2005, 497), as well as the general trend toward a more
insistent criticism of positivism in general, is the context within

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which oral history has undergone its third and, in my view, the
most crucial paradigm shift, boldly confronting in the process
some of the enduring criticisms regarding the legitimacy of memory
as a resource for historical understanding that have plagued
the field from its inception. As one recent commentary on the
ways in which oral history has evolved as a method succinctly puts
it,

The shifting in the terms of the debate [on objectivity and empirical validity] can be
traced in the difference between a book such as Paul Thompsons The Voice of the
Past, with its essentially defensive posture concerning issues such as objectivity, the
failings of memory and representativity, and a text such as The Myths We Live By,
published a decade later and edited by Thompson and Raphael Samuel with its
explicit celebration of the unique status of the knowledge generated by oral sources
(James, 2000, 122).

Perhaps the two most important features of this particular shift

within oral history is a heightened awareness of how inter-
subjectivity especially in terms of the relationship between the
oral historian and the interviewee8 informs the kind of knowledge
that oral history produces; and the growing influence of inter-
disciplinarity on the way in which oral historians frame their
understanding of their own work, especially by borrowing from
theoretical and methodological developments in a number of fields,
most notably, critical/reflexive anthropology, biographical and lit-
erary criticism, qualitative sociology, cultural studies, linguistics,
life review psychology, and a whole range of interdisciplinary work
on the connections between memory, narrative, and identity
(Thomson, 2007; James, 2000). Much of the work I have done with
oral history, including the brief analysis in the final section of this
paper, can be located within this third paradigm shift in the dis-
course and praxis of oral history as a method (Sarkar 2006; 2008).9
But first, a few words about the most salient features of oral
history, as I see it.

Strengths of Oral History

In the wake of the debates that underlay the paradigm shifts
outlined above, it has become increasingly clear that while oral
history can in fact provide access to empirical information that may
not be available through conventional documentary sources, that is
hardly the most significant strength of this method of inquiry. The
peculiar strength of oral histories lies not in their capacity to
provide new facts but in their ability to provide valuable insights
into the meanings subjects attach to particular events or processes
(Portelli, 1981; 1998). Such meaning, I would add, ought to con-

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stitute an important dimension in our understanding of both

historyespecially recent historyand our social world.
It is also widely accepted today that even so-called wrong
statements as Alessandro Portelli puts it can be psychologi-
cally true and that this truth as an index of what people
might wish for or desire is an important element of historical
reality that is often glossed over in conventional historiography
(Portelli, 1998, 68; Sarkar, 2008, 185). Oral accounts, thus, take
us beyond the limits of existing empirical data to the realm of
the subjective (Passerini, 1998; James, 2000, 123), often fore-
grounding an everyday, taken-for-granted level of experience.
They also allow one to capture a feeling for a bygone time or
context that is hard to reconstruct from traditional archives
(James, 2000).
At the same time, it bears stressing that if oral history offers a
way to grasp something of the subjective in history what Daniel
James describes as the cultural, social, and the ideological uni-
verse of historical actors (James, 2000, 124) it does not do so
uncomplicatedly. For one, oral narratives are typically marked by
the tensions arising from the vexed relationship between personal
recollections and public discourse or official history (Sarkar, 2006;
2008; Popular Memory Group, 1998). It is tempting, of course, to
think of private memories as ready-made sites of resistance to
official history that simply need tapping into, or as repositories of
alternate truths (Stoler and Strassler, 2000; Summerfield, 1998;
Sarkar, 2008). However, as scholars have pointed out, private
memories often reconsolidate the very categories which make up
the stuff of public discourses viz. conventions of gender, class,
community, caste, sexuality, and race regimes (James, 2000;
Thomson, 2007; Sarkar, 2008). What is more, in the process of
narrating, the speakers typically seem to reconstruct the past in
ways that both legitimize it to the researchers and make sense of it
to the narrators themselves (Summerfield, 1998). It is, therefore,
essential to focus not just on the content of oral narratives but also
the significance of the form they take; to take note of not only what
people say, but also how they say it (Sarkar, 2008).
As I will show in the brief analysis of excerpts from the life stories
of two Bengali women I include later in this paper, the narrative
organization of a testimony, and not just its content, reveals much
about both the narrators historical sensibilities i.e. how s/he
lives in history10 and the terms in which a specific instance of
telling a life story, to a particular researcher, occurs. How does the
speaker relate to her personal history? How does she situate her
story within the framework of a larger historybe it of the nation, or
the times, a single event, or a specific process? In what terms is she

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going to narrate her story to this researcher? These are some of the
questions that animate my work.
These issues in turn point to one of the most significant insights
of this kind of research: viz. narratives are dialogically produced
within an inter-subjective space where inter-subjectivity refers to
two kinds of relationshipsthat between private recollections and
public discourse (i.e. stories available within popular culture), and
the relationship between the narrator and his/her audience. To
quote Penny Summerfield:

. . . [Personal] testimony . . . [is] inter-subjective in . . . two senses . . . Personal

narratives draw on the generalized subject available in discourse to construct the
particular personal subject . . . But the personal accounts collected through oral
history are also inter-subjective in other ways . . . [They] are products of relation-
ships between subjects and their audiences (1998, 1516).11

Note also that audience here stands for both the researcher and
a larger public who will eventually read/hear the narrative, albeit
through the researchers mediation. Put in another way, a story is,
thus, never just told; it is always told to someone, within a discur-
sive context and already existing structures of meaning. The task of
the historian working with personal testimony is, in Kathleen Can-
nings words, . . . to untangle the relationships between discourse
and experiences by exploring the ways in which subjects mediated
or transformed discourses in specific historical settings (1994,
373).
The issue of inter-subjectivity, especially the understanding that
the positionality of both narrator and his/her audience matters in
the construction of oral accounts, leads us to consider yet another
significant problem that oral history and ethnographic analysis
must contend with: viz. the issue of self-reflexivity both in field work
and in writing. As Lila Abu-Lughod has very aptly pointed out, if
some of classical ethnographys problems came from the central
dichotomy between the (researching) self and the (researched) other,
the specific predicaments of feminist scholarship stemmed from the
inadequate attention feminists paid to issues of difference between
the researcher and her subjects especially when both were women
(Abu-Lughod, 1990). In other words, feminist researchers are likely
to grapple with the ethical issues inherent in the act of interpreting
other womens lives (Sangster, 1998, 88, 9294) or to suffer the
delusion of alliance more than the delusion of separateness, as
Judith Stacey would have it (1991, 116).
It would seem that feminist oral historians have been besieged
often with similar problems. For instance, Valerie Yow has pointed
out the importance of acknowledging the interviewers reactions to,
and intrusions into [the] research process. As Yow sees it, such

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self-reflexivity can afford valuable insights into the researchers

motives for doing the project, feelings about the narrator . . . [as
well as his/her] reaction to the narrators testimony . . . (1997, 56).
Asked to reflect on her own early work, Sherna Gluck a pioneer
in the field of womens oral history in the U.S. admits to the need
for greater self-reflexivity:

The complex and shifting relationship between interviewer and narrator cannot be
captured in simplistic assumptions about insider-ness. In fact, sometimes the
insider is severely disadvantaged, both by the assumption she makes of shared
meaning and by the assumptions that the narrator makes about her. The realization
that any oral history narrative is only a partial history also leads to the recognition
that each interviewer will get different partial truths, given her or his positionality
. . . [There] is no such thing as a transparent interview. The interaction and posi-
tionality . . . of both interviewer and narrator are a fundamental part of the process
(Armitage and Gluck, 2002, 7981).

However, scholars also caution against the problem of academic

navel-gazing, that is, the tendency for the interviewer to grab center
stage especially in the moment of writing, which sometimes result
from this heightened preoccupation with the interviewers position-
ality (Armitage and Gluck, 2002, 82). The realization that difference
between the researcher and his/her subjects in terms of the power
each wields is something to be taken stock of, both in the field and
later in writing, thus constitutes an important step in the evolution
of the practice of oral history.
At the same time, it is worth noting that while the relationship
between an interviewer and a narrator is often marked by asymme-
tries of power (Stacey, 1991, 112114), it is also typically complex
and shifting, (Armitage and Gluck, 2002, 7980; Portelli, 1998,
7173) with the latter often using their considerable power, at least
within the interview context, to steer the conversation in particular
directions (Visweswaran, 1994, 4059), emphasize certain issues
(Borland, 1991, 6472), and obscure others (Portelli, 1998, 66), and
at times even refusing or subtly avoiding cooperation (Visweswaran,
1994, 6072). As I have written at length elsewhere, careful attention
to these myriad forms of agency ought to be a central element of oral
history analysis (Sarkar 2008).
Beyond the field of womens history a context in which oral
history continues to be an important tool, especially in the scholar-
ship on subaltern women who are often marginalised as subjects
within traditional archives12 personal stories can be crucial to the
task of understanding what massive social dislocations mean for
ordinary people, how they negotiate, make sense of, and talk about
them in their everyday lives. In delving into the messy and rich world
of social reproduction and everyday experience, oral history can help

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 Between Craft and Method 587

us both understand the subjective experience of social change, and

bring it to discussions of what is historically significant. As Alessan-
dro Portelli so poignantly puts it in talking about the narrators
many of them widows in his book, The Order Has Been Carried Out
(2003):

. . . [These] widows. . . . were always asked, in public, in the newspapers, and in the
courtrooms, to talk about their husbands or their brothers, and to talk about those
three days in 1944.13 I asked them to talk about themselves, about what happened
to them. Some of the stories that came up they had never told before, because they
did not realize that what had happened to them was also history, and not just what
is found in the history books (2005, 33)

Of course the task at hand is not a simple matter of documenting

unmediated truths about womens (or subaltern) lives, or to make
visible (or heard) the previously unseen (or unheard). But as critical
ethnographers, oral historians as well as scholars involved with
memory studies have long argued, much can be learnt from per-
sonal narratives if we read them as processes of meaning-creation
rather than as depositories of facts (Sarkar, 2008), and acknowl-
edge that remembering is a constant ongoing revision, a dynamic
process, and that there is perhaps no organic memory of an event
(Hamilton, 2005, 17).
In my own research I have found oral history to be an invaluable
tool that can help raise necessary, if inconvenient, questions about
what historical records foreground and what they marginalize, about
the workings of power both in the field and at the moment of writing,
and, indeed, about what ought to count as scholarship in general.
With the above discussion of some of the complexities and rewards
of oral history analysis in mind, I would like to turn now to a few
concrete examples of how this kind of analysis might be done, in
order to illustrate a few of the larger epistemic and methodological
issues I have outlined above. It is important to note at the outset that
my aim here is not to provide an exhaustive list of illustrations for the
methodological issues discussed above, but to provide a few
examples to help elucidate how oral history analysis might be used
to deepen our understanding of the ways in which people make sense
of their lives, the narrative strategies through which they choose to
tell their stories, and how they situate themselves within and against
dominant histories.

Reading Memory and Narration

I will focus here on excerpts from interviews with two women
Jahan Ara Begum and Zainab Amin who are sisters. Born to a
middle class Muslim family in 1930s Kolkata within five years of

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each other, Jahan Ara and Zainabs early lives, until the time they
were married, were spent in very similar circumstances. After mar-
riage, Zainab moved to East Pakistan, later Bangladesh, where she
still lives with her family, whereas Jahan Ara and her family con-
tinued to live in Kolkata.14
The first excerpt comes from my earliest interview with Jahan Ara
Begum,15 who was born in 1939 in Kolkata, and spent most of her
life in the Park Circus area of south-central Kolkata. As I learnt
from her, the area seems to have developed in tandem with the
growing body of middle and upper-middle class urban Muslim
civil servants and professionals in the 1930s and 1940s. Even
today, Muslims constitute perhaps the most visible majority in the
immediate vicinity of Park Circus, although many of the earlier
inhabitants had migrated to East Pakistan/Bangladesh after the
Partition.16
In Jahan Aras recollections, growing up, she and her elder
sister enjoyed considerable freedom of movement. They were both
educated; Jahan Ara in fact completed her Bachelors degree and
went on to earn a Masters after her marriage because her father-
in-law, like her own father, was in favour of her continuing
her education. However, as she pointed out, she was never
encouraged to seek paid employment, something she seemed to
regret.
I will begin with Jahan Aras exact words, in my translation,17 as
she started recounting her life story, for two reasons. First,
because, as Alessandro Portelli puts it, the organization of the
narrative reveals a great deal of the speakers relationships to their
history (Portelli, 1998, 67); and, second, because for me, how and
where the speakers begin signals something about their perception
of what I wish to hear, and perhaps, more importantly, what they
want to tell me. So this testimony began thus:

My name is Jahan Ara Begum . . . You know, some people have difficulty . . . [with]
my name. It is Parsi . . .18 These days, in many houses Hindu or Muslim you see
that people speak to each other in English. It is just a habit, especially with kids
from affluent families who go to English medium schools. That was not the case with
us . . . Our family has always been very Bengali . . . My friends who came to the
house always commented on that. And yet, because of our names we often had to
face the question: Are you Bengali? By religion [we are] Muslim . . .
You have asked me for my life story, but my life is not that spectacular. [She laughed]
. . . I will have to say that compared to most women in my generation whom I knew,
I was brought up differently . . . Well, I was born in 1939, right? Within about 7 years
of that India became independent. As far as I can remember . . . probably from the
age of 5 or so since I was conscious that iscompared to most of my friendsHindu
or Muslimor for that matter my other relatives, my cousins. . . . our father probably
gave us a bit more freedom. . . . We had boys coming to our house often. We were
quite used to men friends. . . .

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The area in which we were staying in Park Circus, was very nice . . . Muslim
government besh bhalo bhalo [respectable, well to do, in high positions] officials lived
there. And quite a few Hindu middle class families also lived there. . . . But middle
class in those days you could say would be closer to todays upper middle class
status . . . So, anyway, most of them sent their kids to good schools. But when we
went to school . . . it was just before Independence, right? [At that time], there was
a different consciousness [or awakening, jagaran] among people. They did not feel
that it was necessary to send their children to English medium schools. Unlike
today, when you take it for granted that good education means instruction in
English . . . it was not like that. So my sister and I were sent to a school that was
Brahmo19. . . . The teachers [in that school] were also very nice; the standard of
education very good. . . . It was in Calcutta itself, in North Calcutta. . . . In that
school, perhaps because it was Brahmo, there were many Muslim girls. . . . Well, by
many I mean . . . at that time there were relatively few girls [students] in each class
. . . maybe thirty two or thirty five girls in each section . . . of whom at least four or
five . . . unlike now, when you almost never see any [Muslim girls in school with
Hindus] . . . you could find at least four or five Mussalman girls in each class . . .
among every thirty or so girls. The school itself was not big . . . but there was some
interaction between Muslims and Hindus at that time . . . So we started our
education. Then, when I was in class three or so, about seven years old, the
communal riots broke out in Calcutta . . . the great killings. . . .
Afterwards, after Partition when the riots were over, and the city was calm again, we
went back to Victoriavery glad to be back in our old school. . . . However, by that
time, many of the Muslim middle class families had left for Pakistan, so the number
of Muslim students in the school fell drastically. . . .20

On the face of it, this excerpt may seem to be a rather straight-

forward beginning of a life story. But, on closer scrutiny, it reveals
not only information about the narrators life, but an additional set
of insights about the terms in which she is going to frame her life
story, at least in this particular telling.
First, note that, from the very beginning, Jahan Ara insists on
both her familys Bengali-ness and anti-colonial nationalist posi-
tioning. In order to appreciate the significance of this move on her
part, we have to remember that the tendency among a majority of
urban affluent and even middle class Muslims in late nineteenth/
early twentieth century Bengal was to dissociate themselves not
only from the nationalist movement, but sometimes also from the
larger Bengali cultural sphere. In my experience of research among
the Muslim middle class, such explicit claims to nationalist posi-
tioning that too, for a whole family were, in fact, rare.
At the same time, note also that Jahan Ara alludes to her
Persian name, comments about the difficulty some people may
have with it, and mentions the importance of religion in her familys
life, signalling to her audience her and her familys specific differ-
ence from the Hindu bhadralok (educated middle class) on the one
hand, and their stake in the larger moral and cultural universe of
Islam on the other. I would further point out that all these different
elements of her narrative prepare us for a certain tensionbetween

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590 Mahua Sarkar

her complex subject-position as a nationalist Muslim woman, and

her place within the Indian nation (whose troubled history makes
its appearance from the very beginning) which, in my reading, is
definitive in her narrative.21
There are of course other themes in this beginning that catch our
attention. One, which surfaces throughout her narrative, is the
relative freedom that she and her sister enjoyed compared to
other women Muslim and Hindu of her generation and class
location. While she does not elaborate on it, the passing mention of
the freedom to have male friends visit them at home is particularly
interesting here, for a number of reasons. At the level of simple
information, it seems to index a certain change in the gendered
social practices of the Bengali urban middle class. But it also
signals something about how Jahan Ara wants us to see her
parents: as liberal and progressive for their times. As I read it, this
theme, which reappears throughout the narrative, seems to be an
attempt on her part to address the stereotype of Muslim conserva-
tiveness that is so pervasive in popular as well as scholarly dis-
course in contemporary India.
Two other themes briefly appear in these framing moments of
Jahan Aras life story: the existence of a sizeable affluent, profes-
sional middle class among Muslims in Kolkata and the impression of
a certain level of intermingling between that middle class and
sections among the bhadralok (mostly Brahmos) before the Partition,
and in a limited way, perhaps even afterwards. Clearly, already
in these opening lines, Jahan Ara places her family squarely in
the midst of that particular way of being in pre-Partition Kolkata.
Finally, note that in highlighting the fact that most of the Muslim
middle class left in the wake of the Partition violence, Jahan Ara is
drawing our attention to her parents decision to stay on in India, and
perhaps also hinting, consciously or not, at a sense of isolation that
she might have felt as one of the few Muslim girls returning to school
after the mayhem.
In sum, then, what might seem to be mundane details at the
beginning of a life story at first glance can reveal, on closer reading,
a process of establishing complex linkages between a specific biog-
raphy in this case, the world of a young Muslim girl beginning
school in late 1940s Kolkata and the larger history within which
the speaker would like to place her life story here, of nations in
formation or transition, depending on ones point of view, and the
catastrophic political flux and social uncertainty which such tran-
sition seems to have entailed for her. In other words, this beginning
provides valuable clues to not only what we might learn in terms of
historical details from this life story, but also the kinds of issues
that this narrator is likely to highlight as fundamental to the way

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Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 4 December 2012
 Between Craft and Method 591

she makes sense of her own life. At the very least, it signals the
terms in which Jahan Ara has decided to tell her story to this
particular researcher.
I have chosen to focus on this excerpt also because it represents
a good example of how narrators, especially when they anticipate
an interview,22 wield considerable power in establishing the terms
within which the conversations will proceed in the moment of
fieldwork. In the process, they not only provide significant infor-
mation but also leave a rich inventory of desires to be seen and
understood in particular ways for the researcher to sift through and
make sense of at the point of writing.
Jahan Ara had much more to say about these (and other) themes,
especially as she recounted her memories of the successive Hindu-
Muslim riots in 1946, 1950, and again in 1964 in Kolkata. In at
least one of those instances, her family home was attacked, forcing
the family to send the children to a neighbours house. And yet,
through all those travails, her parents, especially her father, con-
tinued to refuse to leave either his home or his country. Her story,
as well those of other Muslim women I interviewed in Kolkata, show
how much these womens sense of self has been influenced by the
constant pressure to prove Muslim loyalty to the nation, their deep
disappointment at being treated as other in a country they have
chosen to call their own, a sense of gnawing uncertainty, and the
tension between their feelings of admiration for their fathers and
their frustrations with them for choosing an insecure life for their
families.23 However, the issue of Muslim negotiations with Hindu
majoritarianism is not the main focus here, I would like to turn our
attention instead to an excerpt from an interview I conducted in
Dhaka with Jahan Aras elder sister, Zainab, in which she (Zainab)
talks about her relationships with her Hindu women friends in
Kolkata.
Zainab, like Jahan Ara, was born in Kolkata, only a few years
earlier in 1934. She grew up in the same house in Park Circus as
her younger sister and went to the same school and college. As she
proudly put it, she was the the first among the girls in her
paternal family to have attended college and completed a Bachelors
degree. Zainab moved to East Pakistan only after her marriage to a
man who had been a neighbour in Kolkata but whose family had
migrated in the wake of the Partition. At the time of the interview,
Zainab still lived with her daughter in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Quite like Jahan Ara, Zainab, too, is eager to stress both her
familys liberal outlook, especially her parents ease with the idea of
their daughters mixing with Hindu friends, and their seriousness
about the familys religious identity. As a result, Zainab insists she
and her younger sister Jahan Ara had no idea about Hindu-

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592 Mahua Sarkar

Muslim [difference]. . . . As far as she is concerned, although all

her Hindu friends were from old west Bengali families, and many
were Brahmin, she was not aware of any difference between her
and them. This is a refrain which surfaces on multiple occasions as
Zainab speaks with palpable fondness of her life in Kolkata which
she still cherishes after several decades of living in Dhaka. But let
us listen to what she has to say more closely:

All my Hindu friends are West Bengali, right? But I have never found any difference,
although everyone was from genuine old households. I mean the ones who are my
really close friends . . . Say Ira . . . in her house [in the matter of] eating and drinking
there was much discrimination and avoidance. . . . Her grandmother . . . when I paid
my respects to her, she did not mind it as such. That she probably changed her
clothes etc . . . that is another matter. But when I went . . . well I knew that in the
evening she would go [to shower?] once. So when I went . . . I would naturally go and
pay my respects . . . she would be very affectionate. But in their house, I have never
sat in their dining room and eaten together with . . . [the family]. I mean when in the
drawing . . . room where I was sitting, food was being served and everyone is eating
. . . Ira is eating, I too am eating . . . But in their dining room, eating from the same
plate sitting next to each other . . . that commensality was not [possible] in that
family . . . She [Ira] has never said to me, Come lets go and eat there [i.e. in the
dining room]. Okay? Say I went there when she is eating. She would say, Zainab,
go sit in my room. I am coming . . . It is obvious, right? When she came to my house,
if we are eating [we would say] Ai, aye ekhane bosh [Come sit here] . . . eat a little
with me. That she would eat . . . but in their household it was not possible. But I
never felt bad about that . . . they are Brahmin. . . . And yet, when after my marriage
I took my husband to their house, Iras thakuma [grandmother] herself blessed him.
. . . But the mixing . . . eating together . . . [that was not possible]. . . .

And she continues:

Achha! So in their household every year there would be Saraswati Pujo.24 There
would be singing . . . everyone would sit there. Every year I would go there during
Saraswati Pujo . . . in the evening, when the singing etc. was happening, at that
time. But in the morning when the pujo was going on, at that time going there . . .
[would be quite unthinkable].25

There is surely more than one way to read this excerpt from
Zainabs account of her interactions with her friends. One could
note, for instance, how she subtly stresses her own familys class
location by invoking the old, affluent family status of her Hindu
friends in Kolkata. One could even read in her use of the term West
Bengali to describe all her friends a certain discomfort with, if not
prejudice against, refugees from East Bengal/Pakistan, who came to
dominate much of South Calcutta including parts of Park Circus
in the wake of the Partition.26 But what I want to high-
light here is her awareness despite her repeated claims to the
contrary of the kind of distancing she had to negotiate in Hindu
households.

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 Between Craft and Method 593

Of course Zainab is quick to point out that her parents were quite
conservative in terms of religion, and for all their social assimilation
into Hindu/Brahmo society, they never [abandoned] their Mussal-
mani essence. As she puts it:

In our house there were certain things . . . going to see the idol and all that [thakur
dekhte jaoa taoa] Baba did not like. . . . Others did . . . it is not that Mussalmans do
not go [to look at idols] . . . but Baba did not like it. . . . We would really want to go
sometimes . . . you know everyone from the neighbourhood would go . . . [to the
community pujo] . . . to have fun with everyone . . . you know how it is? . . . But
[Baba] did not like us going with them [to see idols].

In other words, Zainab seems to want to stress that such fine social
distinctions (or is it exclusion?) as not feeling welcome during pujo
at Hindu households, or, knowing that her friends grandmother
probably bathed or changed her clothes after Zainab paid her
respects, did not bother her at least any more than her fathers
refusal to let his daughters go to the pujo mandap27 disappointed
her. And yet, the fact that she draws our attention to these episodes
in her life seems to indicate otherwise. Her attempt to equate the
avoidance of idols by her family a fundamentally Islamic religious
practice with the routine denial of commensality at her best
friends home which I read as an indicator of social exclusion
rings especially hollow in the context of the description she herself
offers, without being asked, of sharing food and a certain kind of
intimacy and unconditional warmth with the same (Hindu) friend
at her own home.28 So, how can we make sense of this tension, if
not discrepancy, in Zainabs narrative?
My objective in drawing attention to this particular discordant
moment in Zainabs story is to illustrate three points. First, compos-
ing stories about oneself is a creative activity in which everyone
engages and oral testimonies are, in the end, stories that people tell
about themselves. Second, in the process of composing their
stories narrators typically try to smooth over the jagged edges in their
recollections to establish an acceptable self for their particular
audience (Dawson, 1994). Third, there are points in any testimony at
which the interviewees attempt to compose a coherent narrative of
the self must compete with contradictory fragments of personal
memory or even public discourse, leading to what some scholars
have called a moment of discomposure (Dawson, 1994; Thomson,
1995; Summerfield, 1998).29 In much of conventional positivist
social science, such moments would likely be ignored as noise or
discrepancy. In oral history analysis, however, they represent
particularly fecund points that afford a glimpse of the uneasy
relations between private reminiscences and public discourse or
official histories, and between recollection and narration.

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594 Mahua Sarkar

In the excerpt above, there seems to be at least three large

discourses vying for primacy, providing a fraught inter-subjective
field within which Zainabs story must unfold. The first is a fairly
common public discourse about Hindu-Muslim amity at the level of
the quotidian in pre-Partition India.30 Indeed, it would seem that
there was considerable contact among Muslims and Hindus of a
kind that was largely disrupted after the Partition.31 And yet, as she
continues with her recollections, elements of a second strong dis-
course one that is quite common among Muslims32 about the
ritual intolerance of upper caste Hindus seems to interrupt the
narrative insistently, highlighting the kind of negotiations one is
obliged to make as a member of a non-dominant group in a majori-
tarian Hindu society, even in a context of considerable and shared
class privilege, and some of the costs entailed in inter-communal
sociality. Zainab seems to be intent also on demonstrating her and
her familys ability to turn the other cheek,33 thereby invoking yet
another discourse of non-retribution and tolerance that is
typically not associated with Muslims in the popular imaginary of
Hindus in modern India. Finally, I want to note also Zainabs ability
to speak easily about instances of othering by Hindus to me, a
Hindu woman, whereas, her sister Jahan Ara, whom I have known
longer, and much more closely, has never really talked about these
issues quite so candidly in my presence.
Narratives, oral historians have often pointed out, are produced
dialogically within an inter-subjective space defined, at least in
part, by the relationship between the narrator and the researcher
(as the most immediate representative of an intended audience).
Read from this analytical vantage point, we might understand
Zainabs relative ease in speaking to me about issues such as
othering by Hindus facilitated by her move from India a long time
ago, to a Muslim majority society where she no longer has to be on
the daily receiving end of such fine negative differentiations based
on community and/or caste divisions. In contrast, as a member of
a non-dominant groupboth vis--vis a dominant Hindu majority in
Kolkata, and as a nationalist MuslimJahan Ara probably does not
feel quite so free to be candid about pointing out the negative
impact of Hindu majoritarianism on Muslims. What is more, Jahan
Ara may also be sensitive, at least initially, to the possibility of
alienating my sympathies as a researcher and a Hindu woman,
especially in the communally charged social and political context of
post-1990s India.
Read together, the accounts of the two sisters, even in this
excerpted form, offer distinct insights that greatly augment, I think,
our understanding of a particularly important period in the history
of modern India. Methodologically, the stories illuminate how facts

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 Between Craft and Method 595

are typically inter-subjective products, where the positionality of

both the interviewee and the interviewer intersect to produce a
specifically inflected account of a life. Substantively, the paired life
stories of the sisters reveal the kind of negotiations one is obliged to
make as a member of a non-dominant group,34 even in a context of
considerable and shared class privilege. The stories also demon-
strate ways in which personal narratives can not only provide new
information about large-scale social processes or events such as
inter-communal amity or tension, or the dislocations of Partition, in
this case but also, more importantly, how they both bring alive and
add texture to what we think we know. In this paper, I have argued
that such sustained, if critical, engagement with how people make
sense of their lives ought to be a fundamental part of the process of
producing knowledge about the social world.

Notes
1
The earliest impetus for this paper comes from two graduate semi-
nars: the first at Rutgers University organised by Jzsef Brcz, and a
second seminar on qualitative methods, which I taught at Binghamton
University. I owe much to the students and participants in both the
seminars for their enthusiasm and strongly expressed desire for work that
contextualises oral histories within a larger debate on methods in the
social sciences. The very first draft of this paper was written for a weeklong
feminist workshop, Exploring Gender, Redefining the Field: Feminist
Journeys in the Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts at the Indian
Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India in June 2009. I am grateful to
the participants especially Uma Chakravarty, for organizing it, and
Kumkum Roy, V. Geetha, Sharmila Rege, Padma Venkataraman, Anagha
Tambe, Kavita Panjabi, Lata Singh, and S. Anandhi for their comments. An
early version of the paper was presented also at the Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies in Delhi. I thank my colleagues, especially Priya-
darshini Vijaisri, Shail Mayaram, Madhu Kishwar, Ravi Vasudevan, and
Ravikant, as well as Raunaq Jahan (Rajni Kothari Chair, 2010) for a
stimulating discussion. Of course, my biggest debt is owed to the two
women whose life-stories I draw on for my analysis.
2
See Sarkar, 2008.
3
According to David Hume, We may define a cause to be an object,
followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are
followed by objects similar to the second. (Hume, 1748/1975, 76. Cited in
Steinmetz, 2005, 32).
4
This was a concern that featured prominently in debates within the
discipline of history, especially regarding the erstwhile aspiration of histo-
rians to relate the past as it really happened (Novick, 1988; Megill, 1994).
5
Sewell does not comment on oral history in his article.
6
The tendency to treat oral testimonies as fact without adequate
theoretical reflection may still be present, especially in contexts where oral
history research is relatively unknown.
7
For elaborations of this point see Passerini, 1998; Portelli, 1981.
8
On the two kinds of inter-subjectivity, see Summerfield, 1998, 1516;
and later this article.

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Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 4 December 2012
596 Mahua Sarkar
9
Since the 1990s, oral history projects are increasingly being under-
taken outside the west, often with a more radical political purpose (Meihy,
2003; Necoechea, 2003; Thomson, 2007, 67). Thomson mentions a fourth
and final shift within oral history, involving a digital revolution, which
has led to further democratization of access. According to some, these
changes will usher in a post-documentary era in oral history collection
and analysis (Frisch, 2006; Thomson, 2007).
10
Hamilton, 2005, 14.
11
See also Dawson, 1994, 23.
12
Indeed, the very contexts of social life that subaltern women inhabit
are occluded as trivial within traditional archives, as well as most histori-
cal, social science, and even critical/feminist scholarship. See for instance
Ghosh, 2006. See also Rege, 2006, pp. 992 for elaborations of this point.
13
Portelli is referring to the events surrounding the Ardeatine massa-
cres in Rome on 24 March 1944 by German occupiers during World War II.
14
The larger archive of interviews altogether over thirty from which
these two interviews are taken were collected between 1996 and 2000 as
part of my research on Muslim identity formation in late colonial Bengal. At
the time of the interviews, the youngest interviewee was about fifty years old,
while the oldest was ninety. The conversation with Jahan Ara although not
necessarily the analysis presented here appear in my book. See Sarkar,
2008. The interview with Zainab has not been published before.
15
Jahan Ara Begum is a pseudonym. Note that each interview would
consist typically of two to four sittings.
16
Colonial India was partitioned in 1947 at the time of its independence
from British colonial rule. Bengal was divided into two parts: West Bengal
continues to be a state in contemporary India; while East Bengal became
East Pakistan. Eventually, East Pakistan became Bangladesh when it
gained its independence from Pakistan in 1971.
17
In my translations I try to stay as close to the original Bengali speech
as possible, and also include, at times, the Bengali phrases used by the
speakers to compensate for some of the loss in meaning and affect that
translation so often seems to incur. The direct quotes used here come from
taped interviews. In my analysis I also draw on notes that I typically took
soon after recording each testimony.
18
Jahan Aras real name is in fact Persian. According to her, some
Hindu Bengalis found it difficult to pronounce her name.
19
Reformed Hindus.
20
Personal communication, Jahan Ara Begum, Kolkata 1996.
21
For a more detailed analysis of Jahan Aras story, see Sarkar, 2008,
chapter 4.
22
I had called ahead to make an appointment with Jahan Ara. So she
was aware of my interest in history from below, and in women as
subjects/agents.
23
This sense of ambiguity towards fathers is in fact more explicit in
accounts of other women, I interviewed. For a more in-depth discussion see
Sarkar, 2008, especially pp. 152157.
24
The day set aside for worshiping the Hindu goddess Saraswati, who is
associated with learning, music and the arts.
25
Personal communication, Zainab Amin, Dhaka, 1996.
26
This discomfort is much more palpable when she talks about the East
Bengali Hindus who occupied the houses vacated by migrating Muslims in
the Park Circus area.

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 Between Craft and Method 597
27
Covered structuretypically made with bamboo, canvas, and cloth
temporarily erected to house the idol during religious festivals.
28
Indeed, my own experience at her home in Dhaka, and her sisters
home in Kolkata, as well as in many other Muslim homes in both
cities, would certainly confirm the picture Zainab paints of her familys
hospitality.
29
Thomson seems to have been the first oral historian to use the term
composure in his book, Anzac Memories (1995). I thank the anonymous
reviewer for the Journal of Historical Sociology for drawing my attention to
this fact.
30
For recent examples of this discourse see the essays in Hasan and
Roy, 2005. For a more general discussion of this idea of living together
across communal divides, see Mayaram, 2009.
31
See also Sikdar, 2010.
32
In my conversations with Muslim women on both sides of Bengal, I
have often encountered comments and complaints about this problem. Of
course similar conversations can also happen with Dalits and Bahujans in
India today. See Sarkar, 2008, and Sikdar, 2010 for illustrations of this
thorny issue.
33
Gospel of Matthew, 5:3842, NIV, New Testament.
34
In undivided Bengal, Muslims constituted a numerical majority,
although politically and socially the Hindu middle class was much more
influential. Still, it bears noting that in Kolkata the middle/upper class
Muslim community wielded considerable power and influence in the 1930s
and 1940s. The idea of non-dominant group, while still applicable to
Muslims in Kolkata at that time, thus needs to be nuanced.

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