[Reader-list] memory, media and conditions of historian's practice

[Ravikant]

Random access memory

by Shahid Amin 

>From DNA: http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1111413
Monday, July 23, 2007  20:34 IST

Publishing hype and a contentious presidential election have fortuitously 
brought two very dissimilar lady residents of the Viceregal House to media 
attention in the last week. On the same day when we read the details about 
Pratibha Patil’s victory, an interview was televised with the youngest 
daughter of Lady and Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy and Vicereine of 
Raisina Hill. Transcripts of the interview, occasioned by the publication of 
India Remembered: A Personal Account, co-authored by Lady Pamela Hicks, nee 
Mountbatten and her daughter, have been carried in several newspapers.

Media-persons have been burning their phone lines trying to get sound bytes 
from historians about whether or not, ‘in actual fact’, the Edwina-Nehru 
intense, platonic relationship allowed the Last Viceroy to influence slyly 
our remarkable first PM. For there were moments, as the author recalls in the 
interview, when Panditji and the Lady were allowed by the Earl and his 
daughters to be left alone, “sitting on a sofa in the study or something”.

To be fair to Lady Pamela, she doesn’t quite say in the interview that her 
father used her mother to get his viewpoint across to Pandit Nehru to refer 
the Kashmir case to the UN; she only jogs the memory of her 
teenage-impressions of 1947 to offer such a surmise. And yet, every 
practicing historian and her next-door neighbour has been asked to “give 
their take” on this most important foundational issue of our nation-state: 
the self-goal that Pandit Nehru seemingly scored against his own Team India 
by taking Kashmir to the Security Council. 
A somewhat facetious response would be to ask the teenaged son or daughter of 
our top Congress politicians of that time, or even the son of a dead 
historian of Indian Independence, to recollect their impressions of what 
their fathers might have thought about the political fallouts of the 
Nehru-Edwina relationship.

The TV and print hype about Lady Pamela’s memoirs raises interesting issues 
about the ways of our media. We have not quite reached the stage 
of ‘cheque-book journalism’, where persons engaged in an encounter — normally 
of the bodily kind — with a celebrity, are encouraged to offer exclusive 
rights to their ‘kiss-and-tell’ story. If we carry on with our plus-eight per 
cent economic growth, soaking in a uniform globalised culture of anorexic 
femininity, North American accents, ersatz west-coast suburbanism, we may 
soon arrive at that as well. For the present, once an ‘event’ such as the 
publication of a memoir makes a story happen, there is no respite for any of 
us constituting the ‘public sphere’.

Other stories can only be variations of different kinds on the same story: TV 
anchors, print journalists, tele-pollsters have either to offer their own 
views, or seek others out for their ‘expert opinion’. It is then that the 
mobile of psychologists or historians for that matter, rings, with the 
newsroom rather than the anonymous ‘telemarketer’ on the line! The public is 
thereby kept informed.

Lady Pamela’s book, however, raises questions about the paucity of material 
for writing the history of contemporary India as well. We as a nation-state 
seem to be extremely miserly about allowing scholars access to the records of 
recent policy decisions. As individuals living in communities, religious or 
social, we are also violently particular about disallowing views other than 
our own about what ‘we’ construe to be our ‘true’ pasts. With the state 
refusing to let go, and communities unwilling to concede, contemporary 
history writing has been practically non-existent in India.

Every scholar who has worked in the National or Provincial Archives has his or 
her own horror story to tell: in the early ‘70s even the day’s research notes 
had to be submitted to a censor in the UP Archives! Scholarly biographies of 
Nehru or of independent India, for that matter, have been possible because of 
special access granted to select scholars, who’ve utilised their privilege 
well.

The Prime Minister himself had rued last April that “the best records we have 
of policy-making …at the highest levels in government are to be found in 
personal memoirs of distinguished men and women in public life. I do hope 
that we do not have to depend [for ever] only on memory … for a record of 
policy-making”, and promised “scholars free access to declassified official 
papers” after a lapse of 30-50 years. I would keep my fingers crossed and the 
mobile switched off till then!

The writer is a professor of history at Delhi University.