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I grew up listening to countless stories told by members of my extended family about the places they could never easily return to after India was partitioned in 1947. Ours was a “joint” family and I grew up with my uncles, aunts and cousins with countless stories which invited us to imagine a past that was difficult to relate to.

As a teenager I had quite accidentally conducted a very short interview with my great grandmother who lived with us in the small Steel town called Burnpur. I was trying to do a test recording on the brand-new tape recorder my uncle, who was visiting from the UK, had brought back.  Our great grandmother, Bidhumukhi had recollected her childhood and how she loved to watch the travelling theatre – the Jatra performances. She even sang an amusing song about a foppish man of colonial Calcutta – the “koilkatta babu” who used “pomatom” (pomade) on his hair. More than two decades later, while doing my Ph.D. research, I would discover the words of her song in a nineteenth century Bengali song book in the India Office Library in London. I regretted not paying more attention to what she had said. I could not revisit her narrative either because we had not preserved the recording. At that point as I struggled to become a historian, in the debates between history and memory, history always emerged triumphant. I was never taught to value memory and so the significance of my great grandmother’s story escaped me.

Even as these stories created an atmosphere of listening, so did the kirtaniya-singers who came regularly to sing about Chaitanya, the 16^th century saint from Bengal. The musical gatherings with these humble folk singers was perhaps my grandmother’s attempt to re-create practices she was familiar with as a child. The streets in the town I grew up in were not noisy with sounds of automobiles; one heard a medley of human voices: the songs of beggars, the shouts of peddlers, cobblers carrying their awls and announcing their availability for shoe repairs, the music of the snake-charmer’s been and the rhythms of the dugdugi that announced performances of monkeys and sometimes, bears. All these diverse sounds shaped my life in listening. I became an oral historian rather late in life. This blog began as an attempt to offer my understanding of what the oral historian coming from a culture of orality sets out to record and what she listens to in the process. Through vignettes from my experience of doing oral history, I reflect on how I have listened differently at different phases of my life and how rhythms of music, everyday speech, story-telling and responses to my interview questions have woven together my understanding of memory and history. For some time now, this blog has also opened its doors to other oral historians who offer their understanding of their experiences in listening. More recently, my newsletter offers an opportunity to contribute to the blog.

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  Weekend Learning Circle
  17th, 18th Jan. 2026 • 18.30-21.30 hrs ISTDecember 19, 2025
  Weekend Workshop on “Integrating Focus in Oral History” On: 17th and 18th January 2026 Time: 18.30 to 21.30 hrs IST