ABSTRACT
Oral history is defined as the facilitation of ‘dialogue grounded in personal experience and interpretive reflections on the past’. The training for oral history research by the Oral History Society is for the interview to be a recording of the interviewee rather than the interviewer, so interviewers must restrain themselves from plugging gaps in the interview/conversation, often resulting in an interview having pauses or even longer silences. This research therefore takes time, but at its heart is the importance of listening. Ethnographic research that does include the individual voice and explicitly includes oral history interviewing is evident in Urvashi Butalia’s book The Other Side of Silence, where she explores the meaning of the 1947 Partition in India. Butalia believed that the oral narratives enriched history, but she acknowledges that she struggled with how to present these in her research.
