The oral history archive, held at Cambridge University, features more than 300 recordings, including first-hand accounts of meetings with Mahatma Gandhi and testimonies by freedom fighters whose terrorist acts aimed to force an end to British rule.
Alongside the campaigners, freedom-fighters and assassins, ordinary people such as doctors, missionaries, farmers and police officers give intimate reminiscences of Empire, Indian independence, and of partition.
The collection is owned by the University's Centre of South Asian Studies and contains more than 500 hours of audio material and 10,000 pages of interview transcripts. The entire collection is being made available in full, for free, as streamed audio at:
http://www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk.
Themed collections of excerpts are also available for download from the University's iTunesU channel and at: http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/special/20091205/
The recordings were made in the 1960s and 70s as part of a wider project to preserve the memories of the British in India, members of the Indian independence movement, and people who had known Gandhi. The original cassettes and reel-to-reel tape had become unusable because of fears that playing them regularly would cause irrevocable damage.
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The digitisation of the collection has taken three years. Master digital copies are now being stored on DSpace, the digital archive repository within the University Library, and at the Centre. The original tapes will be packed and stored in refrigerated conditions.
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