AHR roundtable "life histories" and the history of modern South Asia

American Historical Review

Volumn 114, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 587-595

  Brown, Judith M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70249126946     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.114.3.587     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. Judith M. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Haven, Conn., 1989);
2. Brown, Nehru: A Political Life (New Haven, Conn., 2003).
3. See, from a social science perspective, Tom Wengraf, Prue Chamberlayne, and Joanna Bornat, "A Biographical Turn in the Social Sciences? A British-European View," Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies 2, no. 2 (2002): 245-269.
4. M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (first published in serial form in 1927; numerous later editions in English translation);
5. Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (London, 1936).
6. Javed Majeed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (Basing-stoke, 2007).
7. This process can be seen clearly in the collection of private material from a whole range of people active in public life and stored for historians' use at the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi.
8. I have explored the potential for the life history of educational institutions and families in lectures given at the University of Notre Dame in spring 2008; they will be published by the university press there in 2009 under the title Windows into the Past: Life Histories and the Historian of South Asia.
9. Sanjay Srivastava, Constructing Post-Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School (London, 1998).
10. Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford, 2004). This argument, of course, links with historical studies of the English public schools and their significance in British public life.
11. Historians generally seem to be reluctant to experiment with methodologies used in other disciplines. This particular way of tracking patterns of change in families across generations is well-known to social workers, family care practitioners, and relationship counselors.
12. There is increasing use of the Internet to capture family histories of movement as well as oral history from within diasporas as scholars begin to see how this new medium can be used. See, for example, http://movinghere.org.uk, a British website dedicated to recording migrants' experiences.
13. On many of these issues, see Judith M. Brown, Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora (Cambridge, 2006).