In Search of UN History: an archival journey
Sunil Amrith
My search began within the labyrinthine corridors of the World Health Organization in
Geneva. In a room filled with bound volumes of official reports -- which, I was told, had
not been consulted in a very long time -- I came upon a factual, rather technical,
description of a WHO-sponsored tuberculosis project in south India in the 1950s. A few
months later, I found myself in the spacious and rambling premises of the National
Tuberculosis Institute in Bangalore, housed near the Royal Palace in a building which
was once the Lady Willingdon Tuberculosis Sanatorium. Their librarian Mrs Murthy was
most helpful, and curious about my project; the institute’s library is a leading medical
resource in the region but it had not, until my visit, been consulted by an historian. Mrs.
Murthy had herself been working at the institute since the mid-1960s, and was quite
willing to share with me her memories of many of the ‘names’ which had populated the
official reports in Geneva.
By way of a tuberculosis hospital in Madras’s Egmore neighbourhood, and an
enjoyable interview with one of its first doctors, I returned to Britain – and to the Public
Record Office. The WHO tuberculosis project in Madras had, it turned out, been
established jointly with the Indian government and the British Medical Research Council.
In Kew, I was surprised to find a number of files of correspondence detailing the project
in Madras in the 1950s, and in particular the letters of Dr. Wallace Fox, a British
tuberculosis specialist sent to India to pioneer anti-TB chemotherapy, to his bosses in
London.
As my project has broadened beyond its initial focus on the international antituberculosis campaign, I have found myself drawn yet further afield, with planned trips to
archives in Singapore and Malaysia and to the Rockefeller Archive Centre in upstate
New York. I have come to realise that, just as the history of the United Nations agencies
is (or should be) part of the history of international political, economic and social
exchange, so the UN’s archives stand in complex relation to national and private archives
around the world.
Private papers and personal correspondence are seldom if ever to be found in the
UN’s archives. What was missing from the reports of the Madras tuberculosis projects in
the WHO library and archives, I learned from my interview with Dr. C. V. Ramakrishnan
in Madras, and from the letters of Wallace Fox at the PRO. Yet at the same time the
WHO archives told me more about Indian government health policy in the 1950s than the
Indian archives were able to reveal. The majority of the files on health policy which were
presented to me in National Archives in Delhi were empty, the papers having been lost or
‘never transferred’. Archives are, for obvious reasons, not a particular priority within the
UN, but my personal experience has been that the librarians and archivists are helpful and
efficient and that, in comparison with many national archives, relatively open access
policies are followed.
II
It is a challenge to bring the stacks of reports, technical papers, and committee debates in
the UN archives to life; to shape them into a compelling historical narrative which does
not read like a compilation of policy reports. One way to get beyond this has been to try
and use the archives as a way of tracing the lives of particular individuals, and to
combine the intellectual history of policy debates and changing international ideas with a
micro-historical focus on individual, international, lives. Some individuals whose names
repeatedly crop up in the official archive remain obscure: I am still searching, for
instance, for biographical details of one Mr. Stig Andersen, a Danish sociologist who
pioneered research on tuberculosis in the slums of Bangalore in the early 1960s.
In other cases, I have found the United Nations Career Records Project at the
Bodleian library in Oxford has been an invaluable resource in tracing the contours of
individual lives ‘hidden’ within the official archive. Deposited therein are the personal
papers, the diaries and the letters, of many of the first cohort of British UN officials, most
of them serving in the 1950s and 1960s. The letters and diaries are compelling – they
detail the experiences of a young doctor sent out to Cambodia as a WHO expert on child
health; of a teacher in the rural Philippines setting up schools, and promoting health
education; of a doctor in Brazzaville receiving panicked reports from his staff under siege
in a rural hospital during the Congo crisis.
Attached to one of the collections of papers in the Bodleian is a typed note by
their author, pointing out by way of preface that “the official histories of WHO… read as
though the organization had no human beings in its service. There was nothing of the
fears, the ambitions, the virtues and the vices, which were part of us.”1 It is my hope that
through my research I will be able to convey something of the “fears and ambitions” of
the ‘smaller’ participants in the international enterprise of ‘health policy’. Collecting oral
histories to add to the picture drawn by the private papers will be the main aim of a field
trip to Asia which I will undertake later this year.
If an archival journey which will have spanned three continents results in a
narrative which is able to convey something of the interconnections across national and
regional frontiers brought about through the UN’s work in the field of social policy, then
my project might make a small contribution towards presenting UN history as part of the
social, intellectual and political history of the modern world, and not simply the story of
an institution.
1
Bodleian Library. Modern Political Papers. MS. Eng. c. 4664. Arthur Brown, folder 2.