Oral History Association of India

Home
Oral History Association of India

The Oral History Association of India (OHAI) founded in 2013 aims to provide a forum where oral hist

Oral history is now seen both as a method and as a field that records memories and experiences of individuals and communities whose voices would remain unheard otherwise. Often, in the absence of archival documents, oral history functions as an important tool that can be used to record histories of institutions and organizations – filling up gaps in our knowledge of the past and enabling different

, sometimes contentious, but always valuable perspectives that contribute to a complex and textured understanding of the past and its relationship to the present. Although oral history is not a formal discipline in India, there have been many oral historians who have been very active in the field for more than three decades. Until now, there was no forum for people engaged in oral history to share their experience and expertise. The Oral History Association of India (OHAI) founded in 2013 aims to provide such a forum where oral historians can share their work and discuss the latest issues in the field – theoretical as well as technical.

13/08/2024

The editorial committee of VARTA - the official newsletter of the Oral History Association of India, invites submissions for the newsletter.
Contributions to the newsletters are invited from all OHAI members as well as non-members who are currently engaged with Oral History projects across the globe.

All submissions, in accordance with the categories mentioned here: https://ohai.info/call-for-submissions-ohai-varta-2025/, must be emailed to [email protected] with the subject line –
'Submission for OHAI Varta 2025', latest by September 30, 2024.

In case you have any queries, email us at: [email protected]

09/08/2024

We are planning an exciting workshop on "From Storytelling to Archive: Oral History, Oral Tradition and Indigenous Practices" in collaboration with Arunachal Institute of Tribal Studies, Rajiv Gandhi University, Doimukh, Arunachal Pradesh.
For more details, check here: https://ohai.info/events/from-storytelling-to-archive-oral-history-oral-tradition-and-indigenous-practices/
If you want to register, kindly apply here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfTL-av6TRId2dVRV1LcW-EcYxYZU8GLK5rapKn6FC6TYYBWQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

27/06/2024

Join us for our next adda with Dr. C. Yamini Krishna on her captivating film "Ilm ka Shehar/ City of Knowledge" on 3rd July 2024 at 7 pm via Zoom.

Discover the transformation of 19th-century ideas of knowledge to today's byte-sized information economy, through the varied narratives shared by the city of Hyderabad, Deccan. The film also featured the works of modernist intellectual Dr. Syed Mohiuddin Qadri Zor.

Dr. Krishna, Assistant Professor at FLAME University, holds a Ph.D. from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, and is renowned for her research on film city urbanism in Hyderabad. She has received prestigious grants and fellowships, including the India Foundation for the Arts Research Grant and the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship.

Don't miss this opportunity to delve into the intersection of film, urbanism, and oral narratives with a distinguished scholar and filmmaker. Register here: https://forms.gle/JpqFKdHXrKinDy1z7

See you there!

14/06/2024

During the recently held ADDA session on May 30th, Junisha Khongwir, the curator at Northeast India AV Archive, engaged in a comprehensive discussion regarding curation of the archive. She delved into the intricacies of the curation and exhibition process for this archive across various Northeastern states in India. Emphasizing the imperative to document and preserve memories and traditions, she presented an array of photographs and audio-visual materials meticulously curated to preserve the cultural legacies and histories of diverse communities in the region.
Junisha emphasized the significance of community involvement in historical preservation, characterizing it as a "people's archive." She elaborated on the unique experiences of each community, intricately woven with nature and landscapes, illustrating this with examples such as a photo exhibition held on the banks of the Siju river. This exhibition aimed to symbolize the interconnection between landscape and human lives while honoring the symbolic importance of the river as a signifier of the community's identity.
Furthermore, Junisha recounted the trajectory of the archival organization, acknowledging the support of patrons and the collaborative efforts with the Government of Meghalaya, particularly in facilitating the Museum on Wheels project for "Meghalaya at 50." This initiative, comprising a blend of family histories and state history, was conceptualized to offer a historical journey through the state's rich heritage and its people.
Highlighting the archive's intention to transcend mere collection and preservation of the community’s history for posterity towards opening up a space that allows for active participation in the historical narrative and retells their own histories. Junisha introduced initiatives like Legacy Threads, which aim to empower communities to reclaim and recount their own histories, thus enriching the historical discourse with diverse perspectives and voices.

20/05/2024

Happy to announce our next OHAI Adda to be held on Thursday, 30th May! D Junisha Khongwir will be talking about the practices of the Northeast India Audio-visual Archive.

When: Thursday, 30th May | 7 pm
Where: via Zoom

Event is Open for All.
Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScbGfd09dGzErmOk78eP4sKt8uie_0A14Y9euhgFE8xN8fuOQ/viewform?usp=sharing
Registered participants will receive the Zoom link on the day of the event.

About the Speaker:
Donskobar Junisha Khongwir is a Khasi woman brought up in Laitlyngkot, Meghalaya. She is an educator and a visual artist. Junisha graduated from AJK Jamia Millia Islamia University. She’s an Assistant professor at the Department of Mass Media , St Anthony’scollege, Shillong. She is also the curator at the Northeast India AV Archive.

Hope to see you on the 30th May!

09/03/2024

Our schedule for the Ninth OHAI Annual Conference is out! Take a look. Looking forward to exciting three days of insightful discussions with scholars, oral historians, academicians on various facets of oral history to foster a more inclusive understanding of India's mountainous landscapes.

08/10/2023

We are happy to announce the 9th Annual Conference of the Oral History Association of India in collaboration with North-eastern Hill University, Shillong on 'Mountain History: At the intersection of Memory, Politics and Identity' on 13-14-15 March 2024.
For 'call for papers' do check our website: https://ohai.info/9th-ohai-conference-2024

11/03/2023

Day 2 | Keynote by Dr. Ipsh*ta Chanda titled "Words... Won't Stay Still": Text as Practice and the Politics of the Textuality - Orality Dyad is live!

05/02/2023

Online registrations for 8th OHAI conference, are open now. Register here: https://bit.ly/3wX9vGk

17/01/2023

The deadline to submit abstracts for the 8th Annual Conference of the Oral History Association of India on 'Memory and Orality in a Textual World' to be held on 10-11-12 March 2023 at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, has been extended.
Do send your abstracts by 20th January 2023 to: [email protected]
For more, check https://ohai.info/8th-ohai-conference-2023/

10/12/2022

We are happy to announce the 8th Annual Conference of the Oral History Association of India on 'Memory and Orality in a Textual World' on 10-11-12 March 2023 at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad.
For 'call for papers' do check https://ohai.info/8th-ohai-conference-2023/

21/09/2022

Join us for our first adda on Saturday 24th September at 4 pm. For our first adda, we have organised a book reading session by Nandini Oza on her recently published book on 'The Struggle for Narmada: An Oral History of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, by Adivasi Leaders Keshavbhau and Kevalsingh Vasave'. Dr. Indira Chowdhury who has also written the foreword of the book, will introduce the book.
Members will receive the link on Saturday morning.
Those who wish to attend our next adda, do consider becoming a member of OHAI as this is a Members Only event.

21/09/2022

We are delighted to announce a Members-Only series titled "Saturday Adda with OHAI" on the fourth Saturdays of every month from 4-5pm. The Adda will be an online informal event conceptualised to encourage interaction between OHAI members. Stay tuned to know more about the first adda.
If you have an interest in oral history, want to connect with a community of oral historians and participate in such conversations around oral histories, then join us by becoming a member of OHAI.
Here is the link to become a member:
https://ohai.info/ohai-membership/

05/03/2022

Session VII of the 7th OHAI Annual conference was a Special Session and was an extremely engaging and lively one, thanks to the adda format which the chair of the session, Aniket Alam proposed. Titled “Orality, Oral Traditions and Oral History in the Digital World”, the session effectively engaged academicians like Rahi Soren of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, Surajit Sarkar of Ambedkar University, Delhi and Vinita Sinha , Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi in conversation with Aniket, who kickstarted the session enquiring about the distinction between oral traditions and oral history and whether they gets interchanged or not. The session witnessed some important questions being deliberated and pondered upon by the panelists, which included the issues of subversive voices, data loss, excess of data which helps in clarification, (changing) dialectic between the idea of memory and forgetting. It also discussed the interconnection between tradition and history, and how as an oral historian one need to know the distinction, and why is it important to maintain this distinction. Relevant questions like what happens with the coming of digital technologies were raised in the session.

05/03/2022

The session VI moderated by Avehi Menon of the 7th OHAI conference had participants present on their research with communities and reflect on how the digital had both created spaces of identity assertion and adding to the collective commons but at the same time as Sonali Verma reflected in her work with the Magahiya Dom community, interviewing online means a re-examining the responses in this new context. Wasif Ali through his research on folk songs and narratives of the Gujjars and Bakkarwals communities spoke about his dual role as a community insider yet observer and whether digital serves to offer inclusion to marginalised narratives yet at same time how does one diversify the dominating narrative. Sharon Misquitta in her presentation spoke about how digital accessibility and adding to academia online has provided space for the voices of the East Indian community.

05/03/2022

In Session V moderated by Rahi Soren of Day 2 at the Seventh OHAI Annual Conference, we had conversations over doing community oral histories and how digital tools can help. Bipasha Rosy Lakra, Department of Political Science, Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi spoke about the politics of Colonial cataloguing of tribes in India in context of Janajatikaran of Adivasis in Assam and the colonial construction of the idea of tribe that lingers on even on the present. Lalrinawmi Colvom Lulam (Renee), Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University while talking about chronicling Mizo Pasts highlighted the how pandemic led to the creation of community groups on social media platforms like WhatsApp and conversations often raise issues regarding legitimacy, identity based on shared memories while accepting new entrants to such groups. The presenter advocated the understanding of these spaces of oral histories which are being mediated and documented by themselves and discussed about the ethical issues involved in intervening in such community spaces as a oral historian. Rima Kalita and Parvathy Sailesh, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati shared the oral history experience of Common Pool Resource Management in Rural Assam while conducting interviews: both digital and in person of 10 representative of fishermen who depend on the beel for livelihood and from the Karbi tribe where the beel is a cultural element and symbol for their lives.

05/03/2022

Join us here for the talk by Dr. Tanuja Kothiyal, Writer and Professor, Department of History, Ambedkar University, Delhi. She is live on YouTube talking about 'Exploring History and Memory in Oral Epics of India'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGtU_3R2PeA

05/03/2022

What an exciting start to Day 2 of the Seventh OHAI Annual Conference!
The Session IV of the conference moderated by Sanghamitra Chatterjee (Past Perfect) presented 3 projects that dabble with communities and the digital life of interviews. The presenters - Malvika Bhatia, Archive Director, The Citizens' Archive of India, Mrinalini Singha, Co-founder & Design Researcher, Himalayan Folk Collective and Mukti Patel, University of Toronto - touched upon documenting ordinary lives, diasporic lives and the proliferation of community centric social media pages - their processes and their methodology of ensuring a sustainable archiving effort. While discussing road maps and providing insights into building digital archive, the panel discussed selection process for interviews, how strongly does place and spatiality figure in their archiving process and how do they recoup a sense of situatedness in a digital archive etc.

05/03/2022

Do join us today evening (Saturday, 5th March | 6 pm IST) for our Public Talk as a part of the Seventh OHAI Annual Conference. Dr. Tanuja Kothiyal, Writer, Professor, Ambedkar University, Delhi will be speaking on 'Exploring History and Memory in Oral Epics of India'. It will be a live event so click here at 6 pm today: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVh0ulxDTrHt1i3Y0J_TZRg

Nandini Oza Avehi Menon Vrunda Pathare Rahi Soren

04/03/2022

In case you have missed the public talk today, check the link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX0On0uwNMk&t=9s
Doug Boyd, Director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries, who was in conversation with Venkat Srivastava, brought forth various aspects of digital world that can prove crucial for rethinking our approaches to oral history and shaping new ideas about creation of and access to oral histories to make them available to a larger audience. Doug also touched upon issues of access, privacy, legal and ethical issues that are to be carefully looked at amidst the talks around 'big data'/ 'open data'.

04/03/2022

In Session III of the Seventh Annual Conference, Ish*ta Shah of Curating for Culture moderated a panel on 'Curating oral history recordings for public engagement' that discussed three different kind of oral history projects that have emerged in their collective practice at Curating for Culture. One of the connecting ideas for all these three projects has been the need to make oral history recordings more accessible for community engagement – even beyond the interest of its direct and anticipated consumers. While Chitra Vishwanath spoke about the writing and designing process of Biome Diaries and how they used transcripts as well as mapping tools to engage with the vast variety of data for bringing that compilation; Avni at Pattani Archives spoke about dealing with bilingual frameworks. S Fiona Evangeline presented the research project on tracing the journey of women practitioners in Indian architectural history and how they are exploring the role of data visualisation for the same. It was an insightful session indeed!
tools to ensure that the key findings are easily deduced and communicated. All these three
projects reflect different scales and setups, and thus the role of different team members also
becomes as pivotal as the choice of tools, to the act of reading, reviewing, interpreting (or
not) and disseminating information.

04/03/2022

In the Session 2 on the first day of the Seventh annual conference, the panel moderated by Debarati Chakraborty explored issues of orality and digitality in capturing oral histories of trauma. While Shaifali Arora (Lovely Professional University) Partition History discussed the intangible experience of ethnic-linguistic shifts as witnessed post partition, Sumallya Mukhopadhyay, (IIT Delhi) critically looked at the role of the Narrator, the Interviewer, and the Listener and builds a theoretical argument around affective Listening in the digital Oral History Archives. Sayan Gupta, (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) on the other hand brought an interesting perspective in understanding of memoire of 1984 in Sikh through its Popular Visual Cultural Practice in Indian Punjab.

04/03/2022

In the Session 1 of the Seventh Annual Conference moderated by Aniket Alam, Harsh*ta Bathwal (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) discussed about the Paradox of Orality and the Advent of the Digital, problems of transcription, how digital can help develop intimate dialogue between text and audio with video, open format for public access, copyright workings and problem in accessing the older archives are some of the issues in digital platforms, non-linear digital storytelling etc. Heeba Din (University of Kashmir) on the other hand spoke about the ethical & legal challenges of digital oral history and bring forth critical aspects of oral history such as privacy, consent, code of ethics, etc. In a joint paper, Shachi Vijay, (EFLU, Hyderabad) and Dr. Rimika Singhvi, (IIS - Deemed to be University, Jaipur) explored the space between orality and digitality, interstitial space by archiving memories through the study of different archives such as 1947 Partition archive, Indian memory Project, Delhi archives, People's archives of Rural India, Tata Central Archive etc.

04/03/2022

Listening for orality in the digital record
Dr. Doug Boyd in conversation with Venkat Srinivasan right now at the first public talk as a part of our Seventh Annual Conference : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX0On0uwNMk
Do join us.

04/03/2022

In a thought provoking keynote address, Vrunda Pathare, Head, Godrej Archives, discussed the need for archivists, oral historians, researchers from individual level to institutional level, to use the digital technologies for empowering communities by democratising knowledge; focusing on how nuances of voices are being lost in transcripts, primarily taking away the orality of oral history and the question of digital intervention in making the content in oral history interviews available widely. She also focused on how the digital space is much more capable of collaboration, user-friendly, shared authority, while at the same time keeping in mind that there is collective awareness about the working and limitations of the platform itself.

Check the schedule of Seventh OHAI here: https://bit.ly/3ClT4oV and join us for our remaining sessions. For more info click here: https://ohai.info/seventh-ohai-conference-2022/

04/03/2022

Our Seventh Annual Conference began today morning with Dr. Debarati Chakraborty, Vice President, OHAI, taking us through the
journey of OHAI that began in 2013. She mapped this journey and its contribution towards creating awareness about oral history through conferences, events, talks, workshops that it had organised since its inception. She also informed the audience about what to expect in the next two days of the 7th Annual OHAI Conference as it aims to address nuances of digitality and orality.

Professor Samantak Das, Pro-VC, Jadavpur University in his opening remarks spoke about the genesis of oral history in India and how oral histories talk about multiplicity of truth. Commenting on the theme he spoke about intersection of oral history and digital world which has burred the boundaries between the written and spoken word. He added as to how digitalization creates permanence in everything that is absent in oral history. With the ease of keeping records in the digital world, he addressed the problem of hoarding - i.e. recording without any intention of using them fruitfully and also raised a question regarding do we really become social while being digital.
Thus, we have kickstarted on an interesting conversation. Do join us for the rest of the sessions.

Address

Website

https://ohai.info/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Oral History Association of India posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Oral History Association of India:

Videos

Online registrations for 8th OHAI conference, are open now. Register here: https://bit.ly/3wX9vGk

Shortcuts

Address
Alerts
Contact The Business
Videos
Claim ownership or report listing
Want your business to be the top-listed Media Company?

Country:

City:

13/08/2024

09/08/2024

27/06/2024

14/06/2024

20/05/2024

09/03/2024

08/10/2023

11/03/2023

05/02/2023

17/01/2023

10/12/2022

21/09/2022

21/09/2022

05/03/2022

05/03/2022

05/03/2022

05/03/2022

05/03/2022

05/03/2022

04/03/2022

04/03/2022

04/03/2022

04/03/2022

04/03/2022

04/03/2022

04/03/2022

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Videos

Shortcuts

Share