This lecture attempts a critique of establishment historiography, without necessarily making a fetish of oral history to escape the dangers of an oral–written binary developing in an analysis of this sort. With the theoretical and methodological development of oral history since 1945 in the background, the paper suggests that historians adopt a balanced approach towards oral history. The enmeshing of oral and written testimonies in the evolution of social and individual memories inveighs against getting carried away by any subjectivity either in favor of oral or written histories. Oral history has the potential of reinventing history in India where the discipline of history is neglected and socially deprecated. Oral history has also been crucial to the writing of feminist history and the genre of partition narratives in India. The time has come to extend the benefits of oral history to the discipline of history in general.

Prof. Anirudh Deshpande is Associate Professor at the Department of History, University of Delhi. Currently he is serving as the fourth ICCR Visiting Professor of Indian Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Vienna.