In an effort to record and showcase the life stories and narratives of ordinary people currently living in different parts of Delhi, the CCK team has organised an open exhibition titled 'Hum Sab Mehrauli', where one can catch a glimpse of the past through people's own memories of their neighbourhood.
If memorising names and dates is not your cup of tea, chances are you would have dreaded history exams. After all, who wants to know about the emperors long gone and their reigns long ended.
But history neither needs to be an inert, dead subject, nor does it belong only to the high and the mighty, as students of the Centre for Community Knowledge (CCK), Ambedkar University, prove.
In an effort to record and showcase the life stories and narratives of ordinary people currently living in different parts of Delhi, the CCK team has organised an open exhibition titled 'Hum Sab Mehrauli', where one can catch a glimpse of the past through people's own memories of their neighbourhood.
The exhibition has been organised under the community outreach programme named 'Neighbourhood Museums', under which the team records the history of people in Delhi, and also collects local artifacts from various areas, which are then displayed to the general public.
"The idea is to document oral history using collective memory of the locals," said CCK member Mesha Murali. "History is made by people, their lives, and surroundings. There are not many records of this. It is an attempt to engage with the narrative of the locals," she added.
The initiative, which is partly funded by the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and the Leiden University, Netherlands, aims at revisiting existing cultural knowledge by engaging the communities involved. The idea is to establish a link between formal and uncodified knowledge.
As of now, the team has put up panels at Nai Basti in Mehrauli. The panels tell the history of the locality in words of the locals who have lived there for decades. "The Neighbourhood Museum is an attempt to represent the diversity of lives and livelihoods in the city, through interviews, recordings, photographs and artifacts. Each Neighbourhood Museum shows a fascinating picture of the growth of the city, as seen by its citizens," the CCK team stated.Many people in Mehrauli told the team members that until a few years ago, they knew every person in the area and could give precise information about where everyone lived. But in the last few years, with an increase in number of apartments and growing population, it was getting impossible to know people in even one's own building.
"Apartment buildings started coming up around 1996-97. The first one, Yogmaya Apartment, was built in Ward 2," said Ankit, Ward 2 resident.
Earlier, a Neighbourhood Museum was set up at Shani Bazaar of Shadi Khampur village, which received great feedback from locals, who were amazed to read the history of their area.
"Shadi Khampur has been my home for the last 30 years and I had little idea about its history," confessed 62-year-old Raj Kumar Gautam. A group of children excitedly identified familiar pictures of their neighbourhood.
"Samosey-waali aunty" exclaimed 12-year-old Sahil Saxena, pointing to the picture of a woman.
Joginder Singh Rohilla, in his sixties, was one of those who agreed to have his family history documented and displayed. He said: "My family has been living in Shadi Khampur for over 600 years. The spot where we are standing used to be agricultural land."
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