Memories as Archives

This article was triggered by a question I was asked recently about the two-volume collection of late HT Parekh’s writings published way back in 1995 when I was working with ICICI – then a development bank – The Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India. The volumes were published by ICICI and HDFC (Housing Development and Finance Corporation) on his first death anniversary to commemorate his contribution to the building of these two financial powerhouses in India.

Photograph: Nihar Sagar

Both these development-oriented institutions, bowing to the ‘needs of the hour’, have been converted to commercial banks by merging themselves into the banks they had set up. HDFC has announced the decision and conversion is still some time away.

But why am I writing this piece now about an event that happened almost three decades ago? The answer: to record my memories. It is my belief that faithfully recorded memories have archival relevance.

Many in India may remember HTP (as HT Parekh was known in professional and social circles) as the doyen of Industrial finance in India. But I was surprised to find that the fairly authoritative and the first book on the history of Indian business by an Indian economic historian Dr Dwijendra Tripathi – The Oxford History of Indian Business (published in 2004) – did not have a single reference to HT Parekh. HTP had played a seminal role in the growth of the financial infrastructure of the country for almost half a century (late-1940s to mid-1990s) – the capital and money market, financial institutions and banks – and important facets of the credit and monetary policies. How can one think of Indian business without finance?

Be that as it may, I was asked about the ‘background’ to the publication of the two volumes of HTP’s writings and how I went about collecting all the articles and text of his speeches spanning those decades. Well, it did not take me much time, as I had myself compiled the entire file containing his speeches and articles while he was still alive! Although my professional contact with him began in the early-1970s, I think I started putting the collection together some time in the late-1980s. By then, I had worked closely with him on editing and publishing ICICI: Story of a Development Bank 1955-1979 – after which he would ask me to edit all his writings.

Photograph: Dr Sanjeev Bothra

So, putting together the contemporary writings was not an issue; but I did do a lot of research for his earlier materials and started compiling the collection chronologically. Every time I added a piece to the file, he would give me one of his beatific smiles as he thought I was a bit crazy! I would tell him ‘who knows some day someone may want information on the capital market in India and your articles and speeches may provide valuable information to that researcher’. And he would indulge me!

Many, many years later, this indeed was the response of business historian Medha M Kudaisya, teaching at the National University of Singapore who was then researching for her book on the Bombay Plan and looking for references of that period. This is what she e-mailed me when I sent her the reference to these volumes: "Have managed to get hold of India in Transition through the Eyes of a Visionary! It’s a fantastic resource for the Bombay Plan. It was not available so could not buy it but have got it from the Australian Nat(ional) University on inter-library loan. Congratulations on such good volumes!"

As a social historian, I have always believed that the briefest documents, or even personal letters, or photographs, when contextualised, contain a lot of ‘incidental’ information about the times lived in, that may be of use to future researchers. When I was in the corporate sector, I would argue for the need for archives and plead with colleagues to preserve documents and photographs – physically those days, as technology for converting to digital documents or images was not available then.

So, when editorial work on the commemoration volumes started, it was a fairly easy task – I did not have to go far looking for the content. Though the challenge was on how to structure the sections, since HTP was so articulate and wrote on so many subjects! We classified the articles into eight sections – four in each volume of the book. Volume-1 included: capital market, development banking, credit policy, regional cooperation. Volume-2 covered: industry, economic policy, housing and general & miscellaneous.

Photograph: Nihar Sagar

HTP used every opportunity — be it a letter to the editor or a book review or, indeed, a speech at a public function — to make a point, to persuade and to provide intelligent and well-considered commentary on the subject. Little did we realise that there were 300 pieces, written over the period 1940s to 1990s, in English (he also wrote fairly extensively in Gujarati). The challenge was to contextualise every piece – whether it was a speech, an article or just thoughts he had penned that we found among his personal papers. Even more challenging was to date all the pieces. Fortunately, I was able to do this for almost 90% of the writings! When viewed retrospectively, these provide a peek into the times when debates and discussions formed the bedrock of public policy.

As I wrote in the Preface to the volumes (signed by the then chairmen of ICICI and HDFC), "HT Parekh himself would never have consented to this enterprise during his own lifetime. He was too modest and self effacing a person to believe that it would be of any value to present and future generations. We have thought otherwise... We debated, carefully, the merits of making a selection of his most important pieces rather than publishing nearly all his available works. We arrived at the conclusion that, for several important reasons, it would be preferable to adopt the latter course as it would place his writings in a historical perspective, indicate the progress of his own thinking on the subjects he cared about and, most importantly, demonstrate the persistence of his views over a long period of time. Not to publish the whole would have risked the imposition of the implicit bias of the editors and would have severely detracted from the chronology of thought that would be of importance to anyone interested in the economic and financial history of the period." 

Dr IG Patel wrote in the Foreword to  the volumes, "the collection brings home the fact that HTP was a man of considerable intellectual and analytical ability which he employed for arriving at his prescriptions and agenda for public or private action. If he was a karma-yogi in every sense of the word, his activities were rooted in gyana (study, analysis and judgement) as well as bhakti (devotion and compassion) — all three making a rare and very potent amalgam."

Although today we have far better developed financial infrastructure in the country, researchers and business historians will find in the collection invaluable information about the evolution of many institutions the foundations for which HTP had laid.

 

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.