At the time girls of my age were growing up, the primary story-tellers were grandmothers. At night, after an early dinner, on the parapet outside the house with the moon shining on them, or in covered courtyards inside the house, children would sit around their grandmothers and beg them to tell a story. The grand-mother would invariably ask, stressing and elongating the words in a certain rhythm, as if she were reciting a verse:
If the grandmother was a widow she would add:
The real story-not of her life would emerge later, but the initial question was like a preface which grandchildren would sometimes repeat. In folk songs and folk stories women have always talked about their lives-oral transmission has come to them easily.
Feminist researchers have used oral history as a method to re-construct history differently and to let women's voices be heard. Sumitra Bhave spoke to eight Dalit women in Maharashtra because she felt that she should make an attempt to "find out a woman's image of herself' (Bhave, 1988: xvii). She explains that she chose the "dialogical method" because she and her group needed to know a Dalit woman's life experience in its entirety, and they felt that this method was best suited to it. Stree Shakti Sanghatana spoke to women who participated in the Telengana struggle because they felt that earlier writings on the resistance had not presented the real history of women's participation in it. The women had to speak so that the record could be set right (1989: 18-22).
The choice of oral history as a methodology for this study was born of several of my own needs as a researcher, looking at women's lives. The word "look" is important because I did not want to see them with blinkers on. My purpose was not to essentialise either their gender or their art; rather it was to understand their lives and art without the bindings of specificities in terms of gender and art. The reason for looking at women who pursue different interests in dance, music and painting was not to "uproot" them from their artistic context and group them together as women in some kind of a "ghetto of the feminine," and so trace a commonality in their lives and in their art; nor was it to see them as creating a kind of counter-culture of matriarchal aesthetics, which I thought would freeze them in my study even before I met them. What I really wanted was to try and understand them as women sharing a historical context, living and functioning as women and as artists, in a patriarchal society that fixed them in particular ways. Their varied lives and expression would thus form a collage which would contain a thousand different answers spoken in a thousand different voices. But the questions posed had to be different. As Christa Wolf says, it should "no longer be the murderous who did what to whom" with the "if this /then that; because/therefore; not only/but also kind of logic" (Wolf 1985: 107). I had to choose a method that would afford non-specificity. I decided on oral history and pictures as devices that would grant me, and the women I was planning to speak to, the freedom to "be".
Many of them had been interviewed before on several occasions either by the press or others who wanted to write about them. Some excellent pieces had been published on specific artistes; their voices had been heard before. But I wanted them to talk about their lives in general, to learn about how art was to be taken into account as a factor in their everyday lives; how they sustained their art over the years, how it influenced their decisions in life; why they continued to pursue it; did they have choices; what their family life was like; and how they looked upon life as a whole. I wanted this because I felt that from their narrated life stories would emerge portraits of women artistes, bearing the marks of everyday life; containing the silent elements and silencing processes of their lives and art. These portraits would present a history of their own. Not a linear history nor one that looked at their lives in terms of "rupture points", but a history covering a broad spectrum of their lives as children; as young or old persons; as travellers, as daughters, spinsters, wives, mothers and as artistes; and all these not as separate categories but as interlinked components; a history touched by the flow of their lives.
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