Memories of the Raj

Pith helmets remained compulsory until halfway through the Second World War when the British Army realised that the “sunstroke” they were supposed to guard against could be remedied with salt tablets.

The pith helmet, symbol of the white master in the tropics, “was abolished overnight”. Its demise is one aside in more than an hour of sparkling interviews with Newbigin, who went on to become Bishop of Madras and was recognised as one of the most important British churchmen of the century by the time he died in 1998.

They in turn make up a minuscule fraction of an extraordinary, eccentric archive of testimonies to the last days of the Raj held at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. There are more than 300 interviews, mostly from the 1970s and covering more than 1,000 hours.

Most are too fragile to play on the original tapes. The rest were for years accessible only to dedicated specialists with the patience to sort through the centre’s musty storerooms. Now they are available free to anyone in the comfort of their own home. The centre has digitised the archive and posted it on its website. Anyone with even a passing interest should visit — it is a wondrous, idiosyncratic collection that speaks to us with an immediacy that has been scrubbed from the official record.

Some 90 hours of often hilarious amateur home movies from the period will soon jostle for attention alongside Millicent Pilkington’s gorgeous scrapbook of a “a year’s frivol in the sunny east, December 1893-1894”, full of dancecards, moustachioed army officers and delicate watercolours of polo matches, hill stations and wild flowers. But it is the interviews that are the real gems. On the British side there are businessmen, journalists, doctors, police officers, low-level civil servants and indestructible memsahibs. Among the Indians there are politicians, freedom fighters and assassins, but also writers, farmers, engineers and social workers.

Together these personal accounts build up a vivid, nuanced and often surprising portrait of the last days of Imperial India as experienced by ordinary people. While they might look like sepia-tinted nostalgia at first glance, they are also at the vanguard of history as we know it today, responding to a demand for ordinary voices.

Not long ago history, or rather the writing and practice of history, was in the grip of an acute identity crisis.

In 1989 Francis Fukuyama infamously proposed The End of History, arguing that the global triumph of liberal consumerism had snuffed out human progress. Courage, imagination and idealism would fade away, he prophesied, to be replaced by “the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history” and “centuries of boredom”.

Academics were walking on eggshells: traditional narrative history was under fire from postmodernists who argued against the very notion of an historical “fact”. Bitter debates raged over who had the right to produce histories of women, the poor, or colonial peoples.

But Fukuyama turned out to be wrong.

War and the new clash of ideas following 9/11 reinvigorated the notion of history as a way to understand the world. Globalisation did not kill our interest in diversity but did encourage us to search harder for the cultural, economic and intellectual ties that have been crossing political boundaries since civilisation began. And 20 years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War can now be seen to have liberated the story of ordinary people from the suffocating embrace of class-struggle theory. What used to be known as “history from below” has become far more palatable to the general reader as a result.

Two other developments have placed ordinary voices at the fore. First, the internet has blown access to historical source material wide open, giving enthusiastic amateurs the tools of the professional historian.

Local and national archives are booming online, genealogy sites are the second busiest on the internet after pornography and programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? have spawned an army of hobby historians.

The other notable shift has been the rediscovery of “individual” experience. For Theodore Zeldin, author of An Intimate History of Humanity, the realisation “that each individual is unique changes everything” .

In War and Peace Leo Tolstoy presented history as a chaotic series of interactions between individuals rather than a procession of events steered by magisterial leaders. However, for much of the 20th century even those historians who attempted, in the words of the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, to rescue ordinary lives from “the enormous condescension of posterity” tended to treat the masses and the middle classes like herds of animals governed by common impulses.

That no longer resonates. In the era of constant Facebook status updates and endless reality television shows we are encouraged to believe that there is a uniqueness to all of our lives. Perhaps you can go farther: does cynicism arising from a more sophisticated awareness of how leaders and celebrities’ images are manipulated mean that we see ordinary lives as not only equally valid but somehow more revealing than those of “great” men and women?

Next year the British Museum and the BBC are co-operating on a radio series that retells world history through objects rather than familiar political landmarks. Part of the point is to give voice to those silenced by the traditional record. But they also hope that the public will be persuaded to produce their own household objects for examination by expert curators, creating a debate around what the possessions of ordinary people reveal about our global heritage.

“Every generation writes their own history,” says Neil MacGregor, the director of the musem. “I hope that we are returning to an Enlightenment view that this is about individual citizens of the world, not big ideologies. It becomes so much more interesting.”

Certainly a meaningful shift in outlook on the high street is already under way. Some of the most successful history books of recent years are those that deliberately eschew the conventional “great man” viewpoint. According to The Bookseller magazine, the seventh most popular biography of 2009 is Shadows of the Workhouse, the final volume of an East End midwife’s trilogy of memoirs. It has outsold books from Peter Kay, Katie Price and Chris Evans. The Forgotten Voices series of war memoirs shifts huge numbers of books and David Kynaston, the social historian, has sold more than 100,000 copies of Austerity Britain, his monumental record of often humdrum everyday lives in the immediate postwar years.

Kynaston thinks that there is a simple explanation: “Most people are concerned most of the time with their immediate situation, not high politics.” This has always been the case, he argues.

So where now? History — in terms of subject matter, approach and readership — is democratised as never before but it is also groaning under the weight of all the new source material this brings into play.

When Kynaston scoped out the evidence available to him for Austerity Britain he found “around 20” useable diaries from the period. Today there are tens of thousands of blogs circulating equivalent information for our world. The challenge now is not so much how to justify the study of ordinary voices, more how on earth to sift through and preserve them. Historians of colonial India can only be grateful that its vast population had not yet heard of Twitter.

The Centre of South Asian Studies archive is at www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk