What is History?

Is it a collection of dates and facts?

Is it the study of human experiences, actions, and their consequences across time?

Is it a vital tool for understanding the present and shaping the future?

By studying history, do we gain a deeper appreciation of our collective heritage, identity, and the complexities of human existence?

Is history simply and rather bluntly, the past i.e. a chronicling of events gone by?

Who performs this chronicling and what happens when they ravage through the sands of time to piece together a his-story?

What is the place of Myth in this chronicling?

What role does media/social media play in creating narratives today that will eventually become chronicles of the past?

What are the factors that contribute towards developing the historical consciousness of a society and what it chooses to remember continually?

These are some of the questions we hope to address by turning to a fundamental concept: What is History? We hope to explore ideas which bring to the fore debates around the facticity of history, its (in)fallibility and question if history is only a single idea of the past and if so, whose past. How do these narratives affect classroom discussions and how does a teacher deal with them?

History is a powerful tool, it can sow the seeds of discord, yet foster empathy, care and compassion; its use and abuse at the hands of those in positions of power, makes discussions on history the urgent need of the hour.

Venue: VidyaGyan School, Bulandshahr, Village Dulehra, Post Wair, Tehsil - Sikandarabad, District - Bulandshahr, Pincode: 203202.

Speakers and Facilitators: Urvashi Butalia, Sohail Hashmi, Deepa Sreenivas, Meera Visvanathan, Surajit Sarkar, Debarati Bagchi, Sunita Biswas, AltED––Elia Jameel and Mahaprajna Nayak.

REGISTER HERE

Registrations open till 15th October, 2024

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PROGRAMME SCHEDULE

Day 1

21 October 2024

Registration

Opening Address

Shashi Banerjee, Director – Principal, VidyaGyan School Bulandshahr

Introducing History for Peace

Meena Megha Malhotra

Teaching History, Talking History: Notes from Classroom Conversations

Meera Visvanathan

We live in a time where narratives about the past can be found everywhere – on social media, in books and pamphlets, as well as in dinner table conversations. Many of these narratives are biased and inaccurate, yet they inform the ‘common-sense’ that students have about history.

How do we articulate what constitutes history in an era marked by rumours and forwards? How can history teachers help students understand the past in terms other than those of heroism and glory? And how do we explain the logic behind historical arguments or what constitutes a ‘historical fact’? 

In recognizing the classroom as the primary site for engagements with history, I hope to talk about expertise and how to communicate it. Doing so may help us understand not only that historical assessments are never static, but also how the study of history is important for the practise of citizenship. 

Meera Visvanathan is an Associate Professor at the Department of History and Archaeology, Shiv Nadar University. Her areas of research and writing focus on the history of ancient and early medieval India. She has also written multiple book reviews and popular articles and delivered several presentations focused on public engagements with the past.

History and Our Present: Some Reflections

Deepa Sreenivas

In my work on the Amar Chitra Katha, I had addressed how popular history, or the history circulating in the domain of popular culture, connects with the beliefs, norms, and common-sense of a people, reshaping the way we look at the world, our hopes and desires, our notions of good and bad—in short, our present. In this sense, history is constructed and imagined from within the present; it is firmly located in the politics of the present. Dominant forms of history align with the interests of powerful groups. The battles over the contents of the history textbook—what should be a part of it and what must be erased—points precisely to the critical role history plays in the maintenance and validation of authority and power. History, mythology, and myth-making are intrinsically connected in both academic and popular domains, even though the former presents itself as evidence-based and positivist. How might we develop alternative modes of retelling the past, enabling us to imagine a more plural and egalitarian present? Is it possible to bring myth into history not as a static or sacred category but as constantly reshaped by the context in which it is narrated? These are some of the questions I hope to discuss.

Deepa Sreenivas is a professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Hyderabad. Her research interests include visual culture, childhood studies and feminist pedagogy. She is the author of Sculpting a Middle Class: History, Masculinity and the Amar Chitra Katha in India (2010) and a contributor to Towards a World of Equals: A Bilingual Textbook on Gender (2015) and A World of Equals: A Textbook on Gender (2022). Her research articles have appeared in the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Tasveer Ghar and Childhood.

Between Memory and History : Oral Histories of Place

Surajit Sarkar

Memory and History, far from being the same, are in fundamental opposition, and affect our contemporary relationship to the past. Memory is born of experience and carried in societies to transmit value from one generation to the next, to preserve practice and identity. It is also employed as a means for individuals and the societies they constitute to understand themselves. History, on the other hand, is a ‘reconstruction’ of the natural process of memory, problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. It is a representation of the past made at a moment when an immense and intimate living memory has disappeared.

This struggle between memory and history as means of understanding can be seen at places and sites of memory. By ‘grounding’ memory and history, they force us to break subject boundaries as we engage with and decide on the best way to understand the past, and understand ourselves. ‘Making sense of the local’ requires oral historians to engage with the opposition between the two, listen to its diversity, including lesser known, marginalized and everyday memory.

The tangible does not carry meaning if it does not carry a narrative. Whether memory or history, it is the narrative that allows us to understand it and draw conclusions about its meaning. After all, without a story, there is no ‘there’ there.

Surajit Sarkar is currently an Independent Researcher and a Curator at the Kerala Museum, Kochi. Previously, he was Associate Professor and founded the Centre for Community Knowledge, Ambedkar University Delhi (CCK, AUD: 2010-22). He was President of the Oral History Association of India (2017-19), and on the Public Advisory Board of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (USA; 2008-14). At CCK, he initiated the Neighbourhood Museum Programme which conducts annual local ‘pop-up’ community museum and exhibition programmes that describe urban and rural Delhi from the perspective of its residents, one neighbourhood at a time. Prior to an academic career, he worked as a photocopier salesman, a bank officer, primary school teacher, film and TV director. As a video artist, he has worked in theatre and dance productions, museums and galleries in India and abroad.

Parallel Workshops

[FOR TEACHERS]

Back to the Source 

[GROUP A]

Sunita Biswas

For the historian the source is the key. And for the history teacher sources are essential tools for developing historical inquiry and a critical understanding of the past. Sources as evidence provide context and credibility and allow students to actively interact with something that happened a long time ago. This authentication of the past is especially important today to empower students of history to counter the myths and misinformation that abound everywhere. However, the selection and use of sources by a teacher for a specific topic can be a challenge while planning a lesson. In this workshop we will look at what kind of source/s are available and can be used for a particular topic, the level of complexity of the source, its relevance to the topic, the nature of the information that may be revealed, and the ways to evaluate the information for a deeper understanding of the topic.

Sunita Biswas teaches history at the middle and senior levels at Modern High School for Girls, Kolkata. For more than 30 years her aim has remained to share with her students her passion for the subject. She has taught different curricula across different schools. In the classroom she has always tried to instill a questioning, critical interest that goes beyond the textbook and the curriculum, and that stretches far beyond school. For this she encourages her students to delve into songs, pictures—still and moving— posters and advertisements, among other sources. She has been a recipient of the Fulbright Teaching Excellence and Achievement award which gave her the opportunity to observe different teaching practices from around the world. She has also conducted teacher training workshops at several places. She favours a multi-disciplinary approach, encouraging students to join the dots and use lateral thinking to engage with History.

Places––People––Things:  Towards a Living History Exhibition 

[GROUP B]

Surajit Sarkar and a local facilitator

Cities are multi-layered, complex, and diverse. It can also be read as a large aggregation of communities residing in smaller units called neighbourhoods. Placemaking in urban neighbourhoods involves understanding the experiences of people with diverse histories.

This is not an easy task. 

The use of oral history and memory requires engagement with the idea of subjectivity, to learn not only what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing and what they now think they did.

Drawing on lived memories and experience, the workshop will describe some methods from oral history, to show ‘little histories’ that can be drawn from experiences and memory of everyday life.

Using diverse material (images / text / sounds/ objects ) collected from participants for a workshop discussion, the workshop will show how creating biographies of these can be used to layer information, and make  a collectively curated, participant contributed, living history exhibition.

Surajit Sarkar is currently an Independent Researcher and a Curator at the Kerala Museum, Kochi. Previously, he was Associate Professor and founded the Centre for Community Knowledge, Ambedkar University Delhi (CCK, AUD: 2010-22). He was President of the Oral History Association of India (2017-19), and on the Public Advisory Board of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (USA; 2008-14). At CCK, he initiated the Neighbourhood Museum Programme which conducts annual local ‘pop-up’ community museum and exhibition programmes that describe urban and rural Delhi from the perspective of its residents, one neighbourhood at a time. Prior to an academic career, he worked as a photocopier salesman, a bank officer, primary school teacher, film and TV director. As a video artist, he has worked in theatre and dance productions, museums and galleries in India and abroad.

[FOR STUDENTS]

What is history? 

Mahaprajna Nayak, Elia Jameel

This workshop will focus on two broad elements that make history a scientific enquiry––a factual framework and conceptual framework. The factual framework is one where a historical study presents a description of events from various credible sources and testimonies to explain what happened and the conceptual framework explores how a historian interprets these ‘facts’ and ‘events’ and how they justify the conclusion. The workshop will explore the role of mass media users as chroniclers of time and their impact on historical methods, opening up a plethora of narratives, the role of social media in interpreting source material, its manufacturing of historical fact, the role of melodrama, sensationalism and market driven incentives in trying to replace historical method, etc. The workshop would also question what these developments and the creation of these so-called histories means for historical revisionism. Through dramatic performances, narrative building exercises and peer research work, history will be addressed through the lens of media and information literacy. 

Mahaprajna Nayak, Head of content and curriculum development, AltED: Her interests are multidisciplinary, ranging from education, pedagogy, childhood geographies and media studies. She has a Master's in English and a PG Diploma in Community Media. She has previously worked as an editor in publishing and news media, taught ESL, and been an academic researcher. Her focus area is curriculum development at AltED. 

Elia Jameel, Head of Implementation, AltED: Elia holds a postgraduate degree in modern history and a bachelor's degree in Education. She has seven years of teaching experience, where she focused on history and social sciences. Her pedagogical interests involve integrating social sciences and 21st-century life skills. In AltED, she aims to employ innovative strategies to connect with students and educators.

Day 2

22 October, 2024

A Sense of the Past: Reflecting on the histories of the Partition of India

Urvashi Butalia [Virtual]

In this talk Urvashi will share her personal journey of being brought up with traditional history and finding herself slowly turning to oral history to understand our past. She will talk about what oral history offers which traditional history does not, and how it is important for the two to supplement each other.

Urvashi Butalia co-founded Kali for Women in 1984 and in 2003 founded Zubaan. With over 35 years of experience in feminist and independent publishing, she has a formidable reputation in the industry in India and abroad. She also has a long involvement in the women’s movement in India, and is a well-known writer, both in academia and in the literary world. She has several works to her credit, key among which is her path-breaking study of Partition, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India which won the Oral History Book Association Award and the Nikkei Asia Award for Culture. She has also taught publishing for over 20 years and is on the advisory boards of a number of national and international organizations. She has received many awards, among which are the Pandora award for women’s publishing, the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, the Nikkei Asia Award for Culture and the Padma Shri, the highest civilian honour awarded by the Indian government and the Goethe Medal.

Myths, invented Histories and History

Sohail Hashmi

Mythology and History are distinct but it is easy to present myths and fables as History, especially in an environment dominated traditionally by orally communicated information, presented as fact. Questioning has been discouraged, and the unquestioning acceptance of rituals, practices, oppression in the name of caste, the predefined role of women makes us accept some of the most retrograde positioning and depiction of women.

This is linked to our attitude that seeks to tie past, heritage and History together. Many of these attitudes and markers of identity have emerged and solidified in the last couple of centuries. When we project our present idea of India as a nation into our past, we wreak havoc in our lives. Why do we rarely present the Imperialists as the most ruthless explorers of our people, our nature and environment? We have created imagined Histories of injustice that rarely present colonialism as the perpetrator.

Stereotypes are often constructed via film especially when women, minorities, tribes people, south Indians, Parsis, Muslims, Bengali, Tamilians are depicted in certain ways. These ill-informed images eventually become the role model through which we see everybody, except ourselves and it is this that we project into the past and thus the past becomes frozen in time, unchanging, static and it is this image of the past that we seek to recreate  in our present. With disastrous consequences.

Sohail Hashmi is a Dilliwala. Having finished his schooling at Aligarh and Delhi, he graduated from Delhi University, with a Masters and MPhil from JNU. He was active in the Students’ Federation of India and later a full time worker with the CPI(M). He drifted into electronic media and started working for a living at age 41. He worked at PTI TV, Home TV, Business India TV, before starting his own media company, conceptualizing, researching, scripting or producing several documentary series––Pioneers of Women's Education, Unknown Freedom Fighters, History of Delhi, History of Urdu and others. He also worked as Media Consultant to the National Literacy Mission. He began conducting Heritage Walks in Delhi while working at Leap Years––a Creative Activity Centre for Children.

He loves to cook, eat and travel with his camera. He writes and speaks about food, culture, language and communalism.

Itihase Hatekhori (First History Lessons): Reflections on Writing ‘Alternative’ History Books for Children

Debarati Bagchi

In recent years, India has witnessed frequent attacks on academic institutions and disciplines, particularly the social sciences. There has been an alarming tendency to undermine the discipline of history. How to respond to these challenges as professional historians? Like many of our fellow historians, this question troubled us. We started to think of ways to write, teach, and communicate factually informed and critical histories in an accessible language for a wide readership. We finally decided to write history books for children in accessible Bengali. We called the series Itihase Hatekhori (translated as First History Lessons). Hatekhori (literal translation will be holding the first chalk in hand) is a ritual prevalent in Bengal which marks the initiation of a child to writing. We wanted our books to be lucid initiation to historical concepts. Children develop a sense of history in multiple ways, the primary one being through school textbooks. In India, textbooks have always been regulated by central and state governments. Thus, it has largely been a site for state sanctioned and validated histories, with limited possibilities for critical engagement with the discipline. In parallel to the so-called ‘drab histories’ of textbooks, sensational and overtly political but misinformation-heavy histories circulate and attract a lot of attention on social media. Our challenge was to write books that would be attractive to children and will encourage them to think critically. At the same time, we also wanted to write histories that would inculcate empathy among the kids towards the diverse experiences and practices existing in our country. Over the last three years, we have published nine books. For this workshop, I will share our experience of revisiting the craft of history writing for children. 

Debarati Bagchi is a senior research fellow and Deputy Director at the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF Delhi). Her PhD (Delhi University) explored the agrarian and cultural histories of frontiers and borderlands with a focus on colonial Sylhet. During her postdoctoral research, Debarati started working in the field of history and sociology of education. Her areas of research interest include ideas of literacy and mass education, connections between education and urban transformation. She is currently working on a project that investigates the history of production and regulation of textbooks in colonial and postcolonial India. She is also co-editing a series of history books in Bengali for middle school children with Anwesha Sengupta.

Parallel Workshops

[FOR TEACHERS]

Back to the Source 

[GROUP B]

Sunita Biswas

Places––People––Things:  Towards a Living History Exhibition 

[GROUP B]

Surajit Sarkar and a local facilitator

[FOR STUDENTS]

What is history?

Mahaprajna Nayak, Elia Jameel