Contextualising the Contribution

This is an example of how archives assist historians

That Dr LM Sanghvi was interested in sharing his knowledge through teaching and publication of his research was widely known and recognised. And there was enough evidence of this in the family’s archives that had many of his published papers. But the historian in me wanted to contextualise his contribution to Indian medical research.

He began to publish research papers as early as in 1950. The first six of his research papers were published in Indian journals and because his specialisation at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine dealt with tropical diseases – typhoid, allergies and gastroenteritis.

After he returned from his training in the US for chest and heart diseases (cardiology was subsumed under that specialisation until then), Dr Sanghvi began to send his research papers for publication in medical journals published from the US. In 1956, the first of his papers was published in an international journal – the American Heart Journal (AHJ, 52: 908, 1956). In that year and the next, his papers were also published in Circulation and AMA Arch NeurPsych and AMA Arch Path – these latter journals were brought out by the American Medical Association.

Since the scenario for Indians to undertake research, as well publish it in international journals was very different from what prevails now, as a biographer, I wanted to find out how many Indians’ research had been published by AHJ before Dr Sanghvi’s in 1956. Unfortunately, I could not get any information from AHJ, despite repeated email requests.

In 1958, Dr Sanghvi published the first of many papers in the British Heart Journal (BHJ) My experience with BHJ about getting information on their earliest Indian contributors was different; and it brought out, once again, how much of a help archives are to historians. Though I did not receive any reply to my emails to them on the subject, the availability of online archives of BHJ enabled me to compile the information.

BHJ is the official journal of the British Cardiac Society and has been published since 1939. It has an online archive of all issues since inception. The page lists all the issues, by year. And when you click on the year, you can view the content pages of all the issues for that year. That online archive enabled me search the contents pages and find out how many Indians had published their papers in the journal before Dr Sanghvi.

The first Indian to have a paper published in the Journal was Dr JB Mehta but he was with the Lambeth Hospital in London. The two Indian doctors who preceded Dr Sanghvi in the publication of their research/case studies in the BHJ were: Dr Rustom Jal Vakil (of KEM Hospital, Bombay) in 1949 and Dr AN Sengupta (of Nilratan Sircar Medical College, Calcutta) in 1954. Both these institutions had a history of nearly half a century; SMS Medical College (Jaipur) was not even a decade old in 1958 when Dr Sanghvi’s paper was published in BHJ.

Institutional Archives

Robust Information Retrieval

I have experienced some instances of being able to reconstruct a narrative easily if the institutional archives are well organised. The most recent example that comes to mind has to do with the archives of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

When I was searching for information about Dr LM Sanghvi, I wrote to the School on 26 December 2012 querying them about an Indian student who was the recipient of the Duncan Medal in 1939. Obviously, the School was closed for the Christmas-New Year break that week. On the 3^rd of January, as soon as the School reopened after the break, I received an email from the School’s alumni association in-charge, telling me that the query had been forwarded to the archives department and that I would be hearing from them shortly. By the 11^th of January, the then archivist Matthew Chipping sent me an email with all the details about the student, including his residential address in London when he was with the School, his faculty, his detailed courses and, best of all, a group photograph of his class!

That facilitated my task of developing the entire section of Dr Sanghvi’s student days in London. This was in such a sharp contrast to my experience of getting any information about him from the Indian schools and colleges where Dr Sanghvi had studied.

The email reply received from the archives of London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is reproduced below to give an indication of how robust their archival search systems are that these details could be retrieved  with such speed and the prompt response of their archives department to a query from an unknown researcher.

Interpreting Archival Resources

Lord Mountbatten's Letter

The evidence for the selection and appointment of Cooverji Bhabha as the Chairman of the Delhi Emergency Committee (which supervised and coordinated all the tasks of maintaining law & order, crowd control and rehabilitation in the aftermath of the terrible riots that raged in Delhi after the country’s partition) was found as a letter written by Governor-General Mountbatten on September 9, 1947. This letter is a part of the Bhabha family’s archival collection.

As the biographer, one could have used only the information contained in the letter. I chose to reproduce the scanned images of that document in the book, for several reasons. One, the letter showed how meticulously correct the Governor-General was in not only communicating the decision in writing – even in those emergency circumstances, he writes the ‘orders’ down in his own hand without waiting for his personal staff to type it. Two, he has the words Viceroy’s House on his letterhead cancelled and substituted by Government House – using the old stationery and not wasting paper. Three, he uses both sides of the paper to write on (which shows through in the digital image). And, four, he follows correct administrative protocol by consulting the Prime Minister and obtaining his concurrence on Cooverji’s appointment.

These comments, as observations of the biographer, would have marred the narrative – which, in this instance, was the story on Cooverji Bhabha’s life and his work. But, for a social historian, these observations were important. By reproducing the image of the letter, the observations were conveyed – perhaps more effectively – since an image is more effective than a thousand words!

Enhancing Family Archives

This is an example of a historian building a narrative based on archival resources.

While working on the biography of Cooverji Bhabha, independent India’s first Commerce Minister, I had access to the the Bhabha family’s collection of archival materials. It had the degree certificates that Cooverji Bhabha had obtained from the Bombay University. There were three of them, namely, BA in History (Hons) (1930), BCom with Advanced Banking (1932) and MA History by thesis (1933).

These certificates were the archival resources on the basis of which I, as the biographer, built the narrative of the ease with which students of Bombay University were allowed to move from one discipline to another in the pre-Independence era – in this case, from history to commerce and back to history – a facility that has been discontinued since.

I was also able to enhance the family’s archival collection by getting the image of the cover page of Cooverji Bhabha’s thesis and the topic of his dissertation which none of the next generation of family members knew about.

Cooverji Bhabha’s MA dissertation on “Old Fort William and the Black Hole” has been preserved at the Heras Institute at St Xavier’s College.

The Brick that Launched HDFC

This is an example of corporate archives. An archival object is used as an exhibit on the Management floor of HDFC Limited in Mumbai.

The year was 1977. An organisation to finance homes was being launched by HT Parekh. It was a bold experiment in institutional financing in India then because it was based on the premise of income-gearing rather than capital-gearing. The entire team working with HT Parekh was charged up with his passion for institution building.Most of his initial team was working with ICICI, the development bank that HT Parekh had led from 1956 to 1977. I had the opportunity to work on creating a corporate identity of this fledgling organisation along with Yeshwant Chaudhary, one of the foremost commercial artists of the country at that time.

While designing the brochure for the launch of the organisation, we wanted to use a brick on which we would embed the logo. We wanted a brick that would have some grooves; the ordinary bricks that were available in Bombay in those days were like plain moulded blocks and the photography as well as printing techniques in those days were such that, visually, a building brick was no different from a brick of ice-cream!

So, I remember, we went all over the Bombay markets for building materials on a Saturday afternoon and found nothing that satisfied the creative requirements of Yeshwant Chaudhary. Finally, I recalled that the new campus of Bombay University had used Managalore bricks and I had actually used some of those bricks for a makeshift bookshelf at the university professor’s quarters that I had shared as a post-doctoral fellow. I located one of those bricks and we were able to use it the way Yeshwant Chaudhary had visualised it.

I preserved that brick and, when HDFC completed a decade of operations, I gifted it to HDFC with a letter to HT Parekh, who was still the Chairman of the organisation, recounting the romance of creating HDFC’s corporate identity and the role of this brick.

HDFC has preserved the brick as a part of its archives and it is displayed as an exhibit on its management floor.I am sure that, as an archival resource, it will add a human interest dimension to the corporate history, when it is written.

Photograph courtesy HDFC Limited

An Example of Family Archiving: Dr LM Sanghvi and the Duncan Medal

The narrative illustrates the role of archives, and the role of a social historian, in writing a biography. It illustrates how the availability of an archival article, or resource, leads a social historian to contextualise the object, or the resource, that enhances the biographical narrative.

Among the archival materials that I examined while researching the book Healing the Body: Touching the Heart was a medal that Dr LM Sanghvi had preserved carefully. It was the Duncan Medal on which Dr Sanghvi’s name was engraved. My exploration into the significance of the Medal revealed that it had become one of those objects that get hidden in the mist of times. And, unless I documented the story, the object – the Medal – would probably end up with some kabadiwallah, as few would know its worth.

My father, Dr LM Sanghvi,received the Andrew Duncan Medal in 1939. He was only the fourth Indian to receive the Duncan Medal. He was the last Indian to be awarded the annual Duncan Medal. Hence, perhaps, this is a rare medallion in the family’s collection.

The Medal was instituted at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 1913. According to information received from the archives of the School, The Duncan Medal was first awarded in 1913. It was bestowed in memory of Andrew Duncan MD, BS, FRCS, FRCP, Physician to the Seaman’s Hospital Society and Lecturer in Tropical Medicine, who died in 1912. It was awarded to the student obtaining the highest marks in the examination for the Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

It was awarded annually (usually to two or three individuals). In 1946, it was decided to award it once in two years, perhaps because the endowment amount for the purpose became inadequate. In the alternate years the Duncan Medal was not awarded, the Lalcaca Medal & William Simpson Prize was awarded to student obtaining the highest rank in the Diploma exams. For 1961-62 and 1963-64, it was awarded jointly with the William Simpson Prize. It is still awarded today but not as a medal. It is called the Duncan Prize and it consists of a monetary prize of £60. The Medal does not seem to have been awarded from 1942-1945, probably due to the Second World War.

Among the Indians who received the Duncan Medal before Dr LM Sanghvi were:

BL Taneja (1928), R Sivasamtandan (1931) and MJ Shah (1935). Of these three recipients of the Duncan Medal, a Google search could obtain information only on Dr BL Taneja. He was the Director General, Indian Council of Medical Research from 1964 to 1969. The surgery block of Irwin Hospital (now renamed LokNayak Hospital), Delhi, is named after Dr BL Taneja.

The present generation may not fully appreciate what such an achievement by an Indian student meant, not just for the person getting the award, but for the entire community, nay, even for the national psyche! Remember, India was under British rule then; and for an Indian to secure the highest marks in the class which comprised, mostly, British students, was to achieve something unimaginable!

About Duncan Medal

The Medal was created by John Pinches. The online archives of the British Museum had the following information on John Pinches.

He came from a family of London die-sinkers and medallists. The company was founded circa 1841 by Thomas Ryan Pinches and his younger brother John Pinches who ran the business from 1856. John Harvey Pinches, eldest son of John Pinches (9 April 1916 – 2 July 2007), who would have created the medal that Dr LM Sanghvi received in 1939, was an English rower, Royal Engineers officer, medallist and author. After two years’ engineering training, JH Pinches joined the family firm and continued to run the family medallion business after the death of his father in 1905 and turned it into a limited company, John Pinches (Medallists) Limited, in 1940. The firm crafted badges and insignia in Britain. It also made commemorative medallions for much of the Commonwealth and decorations and orders for overseas governments. John Pinches (Medallists) Ltd was taken over by the Franklin Mint of Philadelphia, USA, in 1969.