MUMBAI, Oct 28: After years of giving oral history a voice, Hiro Shroff, 73, has finally decided to take a holiday.But the `break' may well be just a hiatus in the life of the former journalist and one of the most ardent disciples of oral history. Oral history takes a detour from history's beaten track, and Shroff has been walking this detour for decades. He was most recently featured on Doordarshan, mapping his journey with oral history and his novel Down Memory Lane.As a foreign correspondent for Press Trust of India for 11 years, Shroff covered Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East and China. Apart from his regular work, he also wrote small asides on Nehru, Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, Nasser, Ho Chi Minh, Jinnah and Liaqat Ali. And in his terse, telegraphic style, recorded peeks into another side of history in his column Down Memory Lane, run for five years in The Indian Express in the eighties and published in a book form last year.Readers pored over Egyptian leader Nasser sweating afternationalising the Suez Canal, a correct Mao shaking hands with Shroff, Frontier Gandhi Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan weeping when he was presented a snuff box and a framed portrait of Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi. ``Oral history is not instant reportage, but recording the attitudes of the `oral authors' to grasp a particular space and time,'' says Shroff. In his words, it is ``taping people in their own voices, so that they emerge as they really are, unedited.''In 1960, Shroff quit PTI and embarked on oral history recordings. In 1982, he and Arun Gandhi, journalist and grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, set up the National Oral History Museum (NOAH) in Mumbai, which conducted seminars and training courses in oral history. But Arun moved to the US to pursue oral history there, and with NOAH disbanded Shroff kept his end of the bargain here.The column apart, his projects include tracing the history of sound broadcasting in India, mapping three generations of schooling in a family.Many of these projects, on which hiswife Margaret Wong, or Marge, accompanied him, have involved ``a hell of a lot of travelling,'' he laughs. Shroff's methodology is unhurried: he first thoroughly researches a project, then meets the `oral author' more than once. Recording the history of Bachendri Pal, India's first woman mountaineer, involved up to six trips. ``We met in Darjeeling, in Mumbai, then Marge and I stayed with her mother in Hrishikesh for three whole days,'' reveals Shroff. This, say the couple, firmly places oral history away from the hurly-burly of journalism. Hiro, for one, lets his oral authors ramble on. ``I don't interfere or cross-examine.''In a land where illiterate pockets of the populace have preserved ancient traditions by handing them down word of mouth, oral history is an unsung discipline. ``India is not cued into oral history yet,'' says Shroff. He has also helped corporate bodies like Essar trace their histories. And recently, he was commissioned by Channel IV to research for the show The Raj through IndianEyes, where he tracked down the hamals, bearers and gardeners who served colonial rulers. Only the other day, he got a call from the United Kingdom asking him whether fireworks are Indian or Chinese in origin. Till date, the debate rages on.
