Documenting
Asian Social History at the IISH
Go East Young Man!
Scholarly interest
in Asian social history in general, and labour history in particular,
is on the rise. A major problem encountered by researchers, however,
is the deficiency of accessible relevant primary sources. The International
Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam has experience in collecting
and documenting social history since 1935 and is now the largest institution
in its field in the world.
* By EMILE SCHWIDDER
The IISH attained this position
thanks to its ongoing efforts since its establishment to rescue and
to protect the cultural heritage of the labour movement and of other
emancipatory groups and schools of ideas, often in very threatening
situations. Through these activities, the institute now manages over
2,300 archives, including the papers of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
Kautsky and Bernstein, Bakunin and Trotsky, Guesde and Turati, Pankhurst
and Goldman, and of the Dutch socialists Domela Nieuwenhuis and Troelstra,
Sneevliet, and Den Uyl. Both the Paris Commune and the Spanish Civil
War are well documented at the IISH. Likewise, the library and the audiovisual
collections contain a wealth of unique and extremely rare items, especially
periodicals, photographs, and posters.
Reflecting Asia's enlarged role on the world stage, the
IISH decided to place Asia in the foreground in its activities and in
1996 set up a new department of Asia which would initiate research into
Asian social history and collect Asian material for the archives and
library. The IISH Asia Department deals with the social history and
the history of progressive and emancipatory political movements in Asia
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Two regions in Asia, both vast in themselves, have been
selected for active acquisition: Bengal (divided between India and Bangladesh)
and Indonesia. Both regionally and thematically, the acquisition policy
of the Asia Department appears to have been productive in terms of its
original goals.
But its goals have also been expanding, particularly with regard
to its regional scope. In South Asia, a third country was included:
Pakistan. Having obvious historical links with both India and Bangladesh,
it also forms a bridge from South Asia to the Middle East and, therefore,
links up with the activities of the Turkish and Middle East Department
of the IISH. For Southeast Asia, Burma (Myanmar) was later included,
and the IISH became the focal point of an international Burma Archives
Group, publishing its newsletter and acting as its main depository.
In view of the political situation in Burma itself, however, the IISH
has to be circumspect and extremely careful in all its dealings with
Burmese counterparts. At the moment, pursuing a policy of active acquisition
in: Indonesia, Burma, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, the Department
is open to any offers from the rest of Asia.
COLLECTION IISH
Poster for the students
conference of the Bangladesh Chhatra League 1989.
The collections on modern Asian social history comprise
archival, library, and audiovisual materials. In recent years, the IISH
has been able to acquire many unique documents. Among these is a large
collection of political and cultural periodicals in Bengali, a collection
on the Sarvodaya movement in India, a unique collection of Chinese propaganda
posters, and archives from Burmese oppositional groups. With regard
to Indonesia, archival papers, such as those of the journalist Soerjono,
the trade union leader Suparna Sastradiredja, and the former Soekarno
advisor and minister Oei Tjoe Tat, were acquired. It should be realized
that collecting documents in Asian societies has to be done under quite
adverse circumstances. In some countries, in Bengal in particular, there
is no tradition of preserving non-state archival material in public
depositories, and there is much suspicion of such initiatives. Furthermore,
the priorities imposed by general impoverishment and extreme political
instability mitigate against quick results. Nevertheless, the IISH has
been able to expand its networks and make people more aware of the need
to preserve social historical source material in their possession. This
takes time. For example, it took over three years for the Communist
Party of Bangladesh to decide on depositing its archival holdings with
IISH.
New avenues
Apart from the usual ways of acquisition (contacting owners,
informing them of the possibilities of donating, depositing, selling
), the IISH Asia Department has been exploring the usefulness of creating
historical sources. In societies which continue to be predominantly
non-literate, one must search for ways of preserving history in non-traditional
ways. The Asia Department has been active in creating and preserving
non-written sources, particularly audio and audiovisual ones. To this
end, several oral history projects have been initiated. The interview
projects on political exiles from Indonesia (In Search of Silenced Voices),
the Naxalbari movement (a Maoist uprising in India), and progressive
movements in Bangladesh are examples. The last two involve the use of
a video camera, producing lengthy historical interviews which have already
been used in television programmes in the region. The trend towards
oral sources is an important and indispensable one, and the IISH wishes
to participate in it, of course, without neglecting collecting written
documents. *
Emile Schwidder,
MA is a historian and Research Fellow at the IISH, Asia Department.
E-mail: esc@iisg.nl
