Whose history? Which India?
Indira Choudhary |
TEDxMAIS
• December 2017
Indians were perceived as a people without history in the not-so-distant colonial past. As the British began to write the history of India in the nineteenth century, they concluded that Indians did not have a sense of history in the same way that Europe did. But the history of India that was written and often taught in schools, as Tagore pointed out, hardly spoke of the people of India. Oral historian Indira Chowdhury focuses on the ways in which oral history or interactions with ordinary people give us a different sense of what India is really like. She points out what we all know, but rarely explore - that we all carry with us a sense of the past, which is as important in understanding the history of India as it is for making sense of the present.