Online Workshop on Oral History
By the 1947 Partition Archive
This workshop is a space for anyone with a deep interest and passion for modern South Asian history and storytelling. During the workshop, participants will learn the basics of documenting and submitting the stories of Partition witnesses. After completing their first interview, participants are eligible to become certified Citizen Historians. This free workshop has been offered since 2012 and has benefitted over 7,000 historians thus far. The program has been deeply enriching for interviewers, allowing them to meet new people or become better acquainted with their own families as they listen to amazing stories.
The workshop will be led by Ms. Rumela Ganguly, the Oral History Program Communication Manager at The 1947 Partition Archive.
When: Thursday, 11th May, 2023
Where: Online
Timing: 3 PM - 5:30 PM
About Rumela Ganguly
Rumela is an oral historian and history buff based in Kolkata.
She is Communications Manager of the Oral History Program at The 1947 Partition Archive, a non-profit crowdsourced global organisation dedicated in documenting and preserving eye witness accounts of the 1947 partition.
A masters in English Literature from Presidency University and a postgraduate diploma in Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics from Jadavpur University, Rumela has been associated with The 1947 Partition Archive since 2016 as a Citizen Historian volunteer. In 2017 she became an Oral History Apprentice at The Archive and collected 25 interviews of Partition witnesses in and around Bengal. Currently she works as a full time staff member at The Archive overseeing the communications of its flagship oral history program.
About 1947 Partition Archive
The 1947 Partition Archive is an independent international non-profit, non-government organisation with headquarters in Berkeley, California and an Indian sister organisation of the same name based in Delhi with an office in Gurgaon, India. It is founded by Dr. Guneeta Singh Bhalla who lives between India and USA.
The Archive was founded in 2010 to document the nearly lost history of Partition, taking inspiration from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan. It is dedicated to documenting the people’s history of the 1947 Partition between the modern states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Partition was a globally disruptive event that created one of the largest mass refugee crises of the last century. To reach Partition refugees who were now spread across the world, The Archive developed a new type of crowdsourcing approach to document everyone’s stories in a democratic manner. Their novel crowdsourcing approach has helped, bring forth voices from communities previously underrepresented and histories previously unknown.
The flagship oral history project is the largest of its kind in South Asia and so far has documented almost 11,000 families’ stories. Thousands have volunteered from all over the world to make this possible. Over 1,000 field oral historians and community-based archivists have helped build The 1947 Partition Archive. The stories come from more than 750 cities in 14 countries and in over 36 languages and dialects, and are accompanied by digital copies of antiquated photographs, documents and images of personal objects of historical value, gathered from personal collections.
The 1947 Partition Archive is built by and for community members. One can learn more about their work by visiting the website or speaking to any of their team members.