Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 2 | Page 43

34 played such crucial roles.’13 Ranjana explained this lack of recognition by pointing to the way in which ‘the system gets controlled by these men’, men who, when the Emergency ended, often took up prolific positions in the new government, publishing and speaking widely on their anti-Emergency activism.14 Ranjana’s assertion is an interesting place from which to probe the idea of ‘unheard voices’. There can be no doubt that, as she insists here, narratives of women’s participation in the anti-Emergency struggle remain largely unheard. But Ranjana’s own position, to some extent, brings the notion into question. Like most of my other interviewees, Ranjana is a prolific public figure. She heads an active organisation, regularly speaks publicly on women’s rights, and has given numerous interviews on her activism within the women’s movement.15 It is difficult then, to classify Ranjana’s voice as strictly ‘unheard’. In fact, this was the case for most of my participants. Restricted by issues of access, language and location, I largely interviewed scholars and activists whom I contacted through well-known organisations. Thus not only was my sample fairly restricted, most of these articulate women were active speakers or writers in the public domain. To what extent then, are these voices of public figures ‘unheard’? These issues around restrictive samples are, of course, not unique to my project. As Thompson notes, the oral historian’s sample will ‘rarely be representative of a community.’16 These issues around sampling and voice have been a particular concern for feminist oral historians. Early feminist celebrations of the method often subscribed to an egalitarian view of oral history, as a means of giving voice to the voiceless, empowering people and communities through the articulation of these marginalised perspectives. Scholars have also often hailed the potentially dialogic nature of the interview process, whereby participants emerge as active agents in the constructions of their own history.17 However, as Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai noted in their collection on women’s oral history published in the 1990s, ‘when examined through the lens of expanding feminist scholarship, women’s oral history revealed itself to be more problematic than we imagined.’18 One important tension, which Kumud 13 Ranjana Kumari, Interview with Author, October 2014. Ibid. 15 See, for example, “True Grit” India Today, 11 March 2011, accessed 4 April 2016 http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/true-grit/1/132095.html; Alma Freeman, “A Conversation with Indian Women’s Rights Crusader Ranjana Kumari” The Asia Foundation, 6 November 2013, accessed 4 April 2016 http://asiafoundation.org/in-asia/2013/11/06/a-conversation-with-indian-womens-rightscrusader-ranjana-kumari/ 16 Thompson, The Oral History Reader, 27. 17 For an example of this kind of early praise within feminist oral history scholarship, see Sherna Berger Gluck [1977], “What’s so Special about Women? Women’s Oral History,” in Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. David King Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (London: Altamira Press, 1986) 215-230. 18 Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, “Introduction,” in Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History ed. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (London: Routledge, 1991), 1. 14