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

Chapter 3: Individual Lives and Their Public World

        Individual Lives and Their Public World In the first two chapters I expanded the more usual understanding of “life history,” beyond the life of an individual, to include the life of key institutions and of families, as ways of doing history. I argued that engaging with these different sorts of “lives” might open new windows on to the recent South Asian past, though of course the technique could also illuminate the history of other places and times. Now I turn to the lives of individuals, particularly those accepted as being notable and historically significant, but in a rather different way from a biographer whose aim is to tell a life story rather than use a particular life to understand a wider historical setting or set of issues. How might the historian of South Asia use such life histories? Here I focus on individuals and their public world, and in chapter  I shall turn to individuals and their inner worlds, particularly their moral and intellectual struggles and debates with themselves and their circles  of friends and colleagues. The two topics are obviously intertwined; but it is a division that is convenient for our analytical purposes. At the outset I underline that I am not a biographer, even though I have written major life histories of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.1 A biographer conventionally tries to piece together a whole life in all its dimensions in considerable detail, because the analytical focus is the individual and the unfolding of his or her life. You will not find in my works many things that a biographer might include—for example, a detailed account of family relations and friendships, except where these impinge on a broader historical analysis. To take one example, people often and irritatingly ask me about Nehru’s relationship with Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the last British Viceroy. For me the exact physical nature of their friendship is far less important , and indeed impossible to prove, compared with her significance over many years as a sounding board for his hopes and fears, when he had few within India he felt he could trust implicitly. Looked at this way their long-term friendship, often conducted by airmail letters, is a window into the Prime Minister’s isolated position as well as his key concerns. Using an individual’s life can prove deeply rewarding as a way into historical analysis of important trends or crucial phases of history, as I shall argue. It also addresses two concerns that I noted at the outset of this work. It is a way of communicating serious history to a larger and historically hungry public. I have been amazed and gratified by the great variety of people who have read my two life histories of Gandhi and Nehru, and am convinced of the importance of reaching beyond academia to offer serious historical analysis through this genre. However, life histories of individuals are also an important point of access to new historical sources. We stand at a point in time in relation to the recent history of South Asia when new written sources are still being found and opened to research—particularly the private papers and records of people involved in politics and public life. It is a fascinating question why these materials were kept by those who accumulated them, as authors or recipients, for most people throw away much of their personal paperwork once it is no longer impor-  Windows into the Past tant on a daily personal or business basis. You have to value a written record greatly to preserve it over decades or longer. It may be personally significant in the case of a love affair, a close friendship, or a major life event, or as an important reflection of personal and public achievement or controversy. Some people of course hang on to personal papers through sheer inertia. Quite recently I met an eminent British scientist who had worked briefly in India as a young army doctor in the closing years of the Second World War. When I asked him if he had kept any material from his India days, he went delving in his attic and brought to the history faculty in Oxford old shopping bags of miscellaneous papers, ranging from wedding invitations to letters home and formal reports he had made of his army activities. It was a historian’s...