Capturing Memories of a Family Business

As a student of social history, I have for long been advocating the need for documentation and archiving, especially in the context of Indian businesses which have witnessed a complete transformation in their environment.

With nearly half a century of research experience, I am acutely aware of the paucity of archival materials that can be used as evidence for writing biographies and corporate histories. Hence, I take every opportunity to persuade business organisations, as well as NGOs, to preserve documents that would authenticate future historical writing.

Often, organisations and people unthinkingly discard correspondence, files and even photographs. This has become more rampant now as physical space (real estate) has become more expensive or because no one has the time to sift through and organise old stuff. History is not a priority; future planning is. Also, with changes in technology for communications having undergone a metamorphosis, much of the exchange of information and views is no longer by way of letters; it is being done on the telephone or on emails – media that can be easily obliterated. This aspect of technology had affected ‘collective memory’ negatively. And people have, so far, not started using digital technology as extensively as they should (or could), to preserve the past.

Hence, when I got an opportunity, in 2007, to initiate the process of creating oral history records for a family business, I took up the project eagerly – as much out of my belief in the need for building up such resources as for the demonstrative effect it might have on other corporates.

Forbes Marshall was a 61-year-old business, in 2007, and offered ‘ideal material’ for creation of oral history records (OHRs). The company began with trading, ventured into import-substitution manufacturing and now operates at the frontiers of technology. Fortunately, the promoters as well as many members of the old team were still available for being interviewed and their memories were not covered by the mists of time.

What Is an OHR

For those who may not be familiar, oral history collects memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews. An oral history interview generally comprises a well-prepared interviewer questioning the selected person and recording the exchange in audio or video format. Recordings of the interview are transcribed, summarised, or indexed and then placed in a library or archives. These interviews may be used for research or excerpted in a publication, radio or video documentary, museum exhibition, dramatisation or other form of public presentation. An OHR does not include random taping, nor does it refer to recorded speeches, personal diaries on tape, or other sound recordings that lack the dialogue between interviewer and interviewee.

The project commenced in October 2008. Over the next two years, I did 53 interviews; running into 2,687 minutes (nearly 45 hours) of audio recordings, that take up some 1,241MB of digital storage space. These were submitted on seven CDROMs along with printed copies of the transcripts as well as the soft copies (as Word files which were converted into pdf documents) for ease of access. These run into nearly 700 pages; organised chronologically by the date of the interview.

At the stage that I undertook this project, the technology for recording, transcribing, and even organising the ‘data’ with keywords and indexing it into searchable databases, was not what it is today. So the transcriptions were done manually! Today, software is available to do it all.

Anticipating the difficulty that future users might face in going through such voluminous data, at the beginning of each transcript, I provided keywords and concepts that could be searched on the Word/pdf files. I also gave the cross-reference details of the duration of audio recording and the transcript on each page of the printed document. This was to facilitate the user to go to the exact minute, or second, of the recorded interview for, say, an audio clip for a voice-over in a film, rather than having to listen to the entire recording. Users working towards creating publishable documents and wanting to pick up an entire quote from the ORH would not need to word-process from the recording; these could be just copy-pasted.

Objective of the Project

My concept note for the project mentioned: “The exercise could result in stories, anecdotes, case-studies and other kinds of documentation that can be then shared within the organisation as well as with the outside audiences, as the case may require or permit.”

How I Went about It

I began with recording the memories of some of the oldest ‘associates’ of FM – promoters, directors, employees, consultants, bankers, technologists, etc, to record their memories of the growth/development of the company from its earliest times. This involved the following activities:

• Identifying the persons to be interviewed and preparing their bio-sketch from HR records; this enabled me to contextualise the OHR and obtain focused information.
• Doing the audio-recorded interviews – sometimes multiple -- depending on the time available from the person and the ‘information-richness’ of the interviewee.
• Transcribing the recordings, extracting the knowledge content of the interview, and preparing a detailed index for each interview.
• Extracting embedded knowledge.
• Creating a separate database /catalogue of these tapes/CDs with detailed content index – which could be managed by the company’s library.

My responsibility ended with the penultimate point above. Since then, FM has created another series of OHRs which have also been used for writing the history of the company. The history has now been published as a book titled: A Different Business: The Forbes Marshall Story.

That the project achieved its objective – of “result(ing) in stories, anecdotes, case-studies and other kinds of documentation that can be then shared within the organisation as well as with the outside audiences” – is amply visible in the many, many quotes from the OHRs in the book.

Archiving Family Memorabilia: Contributing to Business History

This is an edited version of the text of my introductory remarks for a panel discussion on: “Profit from the Past: The Power of Family and Business Archiving”, held on August 9, 2016 at Mumbai, organised by Asset Vantage.

  

As a student of development administration since 1965, I have documented the processes of change – in societies, organisations and individuals – and analysed the factors that influence these processes. In these endeavours, I have dealt with archives – good bad and indifferent – at academic institutions, business organisations, government, non-profit organisations, and families.

After half a century of research experience, I have come to the conclusion that we Indians have little sense of history, even though we have such a rich and long tradition as a society and culture. I find this trait especially inexplicable, since I come from Rajasthan – a land where families and dynasties employed charans and bhaats to compile and narrate their histories. This trait of ours has especially affected the subject of business history.

I am sure all of us have a wealth of memories which we consider far more valuable than all the other wealth that we may have made in our lifetime. And it is a wealth we are ever willing to share with our dear ones. What this wealth of memories is to individuals, archives are to institutions and organisations. They are the non-capitalised wealth of organisations. They provide evidence on which narratives are based. They comprise objects and materials that represent events, people and developments in the journey of an organisation.

But without getting into too much academic discourse about the discipline of archiving, let us briefly understand what the word archives refer to.

As a noun, an archive refers to a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, an institution, or a group of people. Constituents of the noun archive could be: documents, letters, personal diaries, ledgers, photographs, audio recordings, videos, artefacts, and digital materials on social media, etc.

As a verb, archiving refers to the task of placing or storing something in an organised collection. Constituents of the verb archiving include: creation of archives, which comprises a) Selection process; and b) Identification of the information content of the resource. It then covers organising, storage and preservation of those resources and developing a retrieval or search system. Those whose work is described by the verb are, today, a highly specialised profession.

Most people or organisations want to document their biographies/histories for specific events – when they reach important milestones. So the exercise is always event-led or event-based. When I was in the corporate world, I have dealt with a ‘brochure’ that was published at the end of a decade of operations, and a book while celebrating the silver jubilee of the organisation. Two of the biographies I have worked on were published to mark the birth centenary of individuals.

The first task is, of course, sifting through the materials. The task is generally so humongous and so time-consuming that most people want to postpone it. In organisations, it is so thankless a task that no one, other than perhaps the librarian, is assigned the function. And, unless the person has an interest in history, he or she does the task rather grudgingly. But one realises the importance of such a collection only when one wants to write a history or a biography. Without such resources, these publications turn out to be just brochures and the biographies are just hagiographies! I have had to turn down several such assignments because there was a lack or archival materials to build a narrative based on facts — not just hearsay.

I will not go into the details of ‘how’ to archive because that is not my specialisation. But, as a social historian, I would like to emphasise that, unless you create the archives for your family or organisation, you are obliterating a part of our history. I firmly believe that all of us are living through such fascinating times, that if we do not document our experiences and store them in a way that the future generations may have access to them, and learn from them, we are not doing justice to ourselves as well as to the next generation. And, while technology has made letters and other forms of written documentation almost obsolete, it offers so many easy methods to create, to store, to retrieve and to share, that we have just no excuse for not performing this task.

I have shared some of experiences — of using archives and creating narratives from archival objects by way of examples. These are: Institutional Archives; Interpreting Archival Resources; Enhancing Family Archives; The Brick that Launched HDFC; Family Archiving: Dr LM Sanghvi and the Duncan Medal. All the examples illustrate the availability of an archival resource and how a social historian puts the information content of that resource in its context by researching on that content.

Some of the books showcased demonstrate the way a historian draws information from, say, letters —about the life and living conditions of that period. These books also bring to life how archival materials can be used as design elements.

The topic of oral history has acquired special importance in the current times as we seem to have moved away from committing our thoughts to pen and paper and rely more and more on oral communication. The importance of recorded interviews was poignantly brought out by Voices from the Inner Courtyard – the biography of Leela Somani. For writing the book, I had recorded my interviews with her husband and her daughter-in-law both of whom passed away a few years after the book was released. Those oral history records have become an invaluable part of the family’s archives today.

If you are hesitant about sharing your experiences by putting your thoughts on paper, please create oral histories by keeping audio-recorded personal diaries. Technology enables you to protect your privacy and to preserve these records. Imagine how much you would be contributing to the discipline of business history of this country.