Wednesday 20 January 2010

Digital oral history archive launched

Observant Times readers may have spotted two articles by Ben Hoyle on the digital archive of oral history recordings at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, on the 5th and 7th December 2009.

The archive includes over 300 interviews, ranging from 15 minutes to 8 hours long, some are with women, most are in English and date from the 1970s. They cover an enormous subject range - from the popularization of Hindi and question of Hindi as national language of India, to leprosy and surgical rebuilding, and from discussions about Gandhi, the civil disobedience and non-cooperation movements to mass migrations at Partition, to the life of tea planters and forest officers.

The archive is freely accessible over the internet and offers a fresh insight into events in India in the decades preceding Independence.