Shahid Amin
SHAHID AMIN – Professor of History at Delhi University. He is the author of Event, Metaphor, Memory : Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992 (1995), and Writing Alternative Histories : A View from India (2002).
The Linguistic Survey of India was conducted by the British authorities from 1914 to 1929 to record Indian dialects and languages – ostensibly for the training of British civil servants in India. The recordings were untraceable for a long time and were recovered recently and quite unexpectedly from the basement of the British Library in London. The survey contains recordings of stories, poems, songs and other parts of our oral heritage which have been lost. This is what makes the recordings so valuable. Shahid Amin introduces these recordings and tells the incredible story of how they were conducted. He is in the process of digitizing them in collaboration with the University of Chicago. They will soon be available on this website.
