Windows into the Past: Life Histories and the Historian of South Asia

Chapter 2: Family Histories

        Family Histories The previous chapter examined aspects of the “life history” of a particular Oxford college, to ask whether they could provide new source material for the historian of South Asia. The personal and career records of Balliol men who served in India demonstrated, among many other things, considerable evidence about the significance of British family traditions and connections in the creation of a professional elite involved with imperial India. This provided a perspective rather different from existing work on imperial families through the lens of their management of childhood when far away from home.1 This chapter turns to South Asian families as the focus. In particular I want to ask whether what I call the longitudinal study of families could be a historical technique for a deeper understanding of social change over several generations of South Asians. My hope is that this may be a means of opening a window on to the lives of those who  often do not leave behind written records, such as those conventionally used by historians, particularly women and those many who migrated from the subcontinent from the early nineteenth century. So in a sense this is a search for a way of encountering and listening to “subaltern” lives—to use the terminology that has informed much writing on South Asia since the early s. But this is only the start of a project, just a sketch of what might be a fruitful mode of historical research. I hope it may address the twin problems of sources and communication outside the often closed world of academic history. At the outset it is worth remembering that here exists one of the greatest gulfs between popular and academic history. Family history has probably never been as popular as it is today because we increasingly live in a highly mobile society, where many people and their ancestors have moved through choice or compulsion of different sorts. People of many kinds are searching for their roots, whether these lie in slavery, in recent large-scale migrations, or in the more prosaic residence of families in one area over many generations. Modern technology has made this far more possible and less laborious, particularly as various kinds of official demographic records have become accessible on the Internet. Certificates of births, marriages, and deaths, details of census records over a hundred years old, and records of those killed in the two world wars of the past century have all opened up to people, at least in the Western world, details of their relatives’ experiences which would once have taken months of painstaking research in many different record repositories, and would in many cases have required foreign travel. Moreover, television programme makers have realised that the personal journeys of ancestral discovery make dramatic and fascinating viewing, showing what complex mixtures most of us are, and often how chequered was the experience of our ancestors.2 This sort of popular family history is by its very nature quite limited and often fails to move beyond amateur genealogy. It also remains the case that the evidence uncovered can often only be interpreted if one already knows a considerable amount about social history, particularly about the lives and conventions of particular  Windows into the Past social and regional groups, the opening of new economic opportunities , or the economic disasters that have driven people away from home in search of a living, or the political pressures that have displaced many hundreds of thousands. Professional historians, by comparison with enthusiastic amateurs, have shown comparatively little interest in family history. An exception is the case of elite and colourful dynasties such as the British Strachey family.3 In relation to South Asia, family history is particularly difficult, given the absence of the sort of personal records generated in Europe and America by the recording requirements of the modern state in relation to its citizens. To this day many South Asians, particularly those of rural origin, have no certificates of key life events—a fact which makes life profoundly difficult when they come up against the bureaucratic formalities of migration. Moreover, the decennial census, straight descendent of the colonial census in India, does not provide the sort of household information available in the underlying records of the British census, for example. There are of course for highercaste Hindu families the religious records of births, deaths, and marriages...