Oral accounts: Towards an alternative history of the nation

CAP wants oral narratives to be recognised as archival material

LAHORE:

The second day of the 6th International THAAP Conference on the People’s History of Pakistan kicked off on Saturday with a session chaired by writer Mushtaq Soofi.

Delivering the first presentation of the day, Citizens Archive of Pakistan Oral History Project director Owais Rana spoke about the importance of archiving history by employing alternative methods. He said Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, the founder of the organisation, had noticed that oral accounts of people who had witnessed the Holocaust were present at the Holocaust Museum in the United States while visiting the country in 2007. “It had then dawned on her that no organisation was doing something similar in Pakistan for those who had witnessed the partition of the Indian subcontinent,” Rana said.  He said studies had revealed that three per cent of Pakistan’s present population had witnessed Partition.

Rana said it was in 2007 that the organisation had taken up the task of recording the narratives of such people, understanding their accounts as alternatives to historical literature. “We want these recordings to be recognised as credible archival material,” he said. Rana said his team had traversed the entire length and breadth of the nation to identify people who had witnessed Partition.  “The first person I personally interviewed was my driver’s father, who had walked to Pakistan at the time of Partition and was poisoned twice,” he said.

Dramatic reader Raza Naeem presented the first paper of the session on the contribution of Habib Jalib and Sibte-Hasan. It focused on the distinguished careers of Jalib as a people’s poet and Hasan’s as a people’s historian. “They were two of the greatest personalities of the leftist movement. If one views Jalib’s poems from the time he migrated to Pakistan, they can actually delineate the nation’s history in chronological order.” Naeem said Jalib had been at the forefront of activism as pivotal events of national importance transpired over time. “Hasan is regarded as one of the most enlightened historians and intellectuals of the nation,” he said, adding that one of his books that should be discussed is the Evolutino of Culture in Pakistan that was published four decades ago. Naeem said his intent was to ascribe a central road to culture in explaining the people’s history of Pakistan.

“Photography can mean a thousand different things to different people. Photographers have become biographers of their time. They observe, preserve and construct an archaeology of nostalgia which defines people’s recent social past through the images they capture,” photographer Umair Ghani remarked while presenting the next paper of the session. He said these images eventually became secondary historical references. Ghani displayed a few photographs he had compiled over the last 20 years as the history of ‘his people.’ He said he had discovered various streaks of cultural, religious and social trends that had once coexisted in the nation.

“I was told there was a time when we all lived in communal harmony, so I took my camera out and tried to capture it,” he said. Ghani concluded by presenting pictures of various areas that portrayed people’s emotions.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 8^th, 2015.