Tlie Living Past

The last quarter of a century has seen a quiet revolution in the writing of history. Not a complete revolution, of course; rather, as a result of the technological developments represented by the tape recorder, the possibilities open to historians have expanded. The sources available for the writing of recent and contemporary history now go far beyond the corpus of documents, to include the immediate testimony of the women and men directly involved in or affected by the making of history. Although the writing of history on the basis of evidence preserved on tape has yet to win approval from the more conservative academic historians in India and elsewhere, the use of oral sources is hardly a novelty. Indeed, it is only during the last one hundred or one hundred and fifty years that reliance on written documents has taken that com plete precedence over oral testimony. To return to the beginning of history, the Iliad, at the time it was first committed to writing, had enshrined an oral tradition six hundred years old, whose accuracy had been vindicated by modern archaeological and philological research. The great historians of classical, mediaeval and Renaissance Europe, Herodotus, Bede, Guicciardini, Clarendon, Burnet and many others, relied similarly on oral testimony to a great extent; although the 17th and 18th centuries had already begun, in the proliferation and preser vation of written documents, to add a new dimension to historical scholarship. As late as the mid-19th century Macaulay, in his History of England, was pleading for the use of the oral tradition in writing social history. 'The common people of that age (the 18th century) were not in the habit of meeting for public discussion, or haranguing, or of petition ing parliament. No newspaper pleaded their cause ... A great part of their history is to be learned only from ballads'.1 As professional historians retreated into their academic ivory tower, seeing the world almost exclusively through the medium of documents, the testimony of living people became the preserve of the story-teller and the social scientist. Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte