This paper draws from the phenomenal work by Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, in which he states that the discrepancy between ‘fact’ as often circumscribed by historians as a potent tool of investigation, and ‘memory’ that seems intangible, and therefore, unreliable, ‘ultimately enhances the value of the oral sources as historical documents’. Oral History helps us to see how people make sense of significant events (meaning-making), and, indeed, what makes those events significant to them.
Upon this fundamental premise, this paper aims to explore the oral history narratives of teacher activists, as recorded by the author, of one of the largest teachers’ trade union, the Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA), to study how emotions and affect played an important role in the teachers struggle in the decades after the independence of India, especially from the 1970s-2000s. The author would explore how teachers were mobilized into action through emotions and affect deeply rooted in their socio-cultural contexts, charged especially with the ongoing political articulation of a ‘nation-in-the-making’ which helped in the creation of a collective national memory.
Further, a recalling of the events in the period of struggle, especially organizing of action-programs, conducting strikes, writing and circulating pamphlets, sacrificing personal and family time, each from a different context foregrounds what Portelli has often reiterated: Meaning-making. Perhaps, it is not enough to make a clinical analyses of historically-significant events as they happened in a chronological order, or locate the events in their socio-politico-cultural contexts, as most historians are prone to do; this paper seeks to underline that it is equally significant to understand how people make sense of the events when recalled by them, and what was it that moved them into action, highlighting especially the sociocultural particularism of groups/communities.
