In search of a full story
‘Reproducing Narratives’ is a project in search of a full story within Indian history. There is, of course, not one true narrative (despite what Indian history books and textbooks might lead us to believe); there are millions. And what is produced and reproduced, in the end, will serve the intentions and the interests of the historian and researcher. In most cases, the historian is the hegemon, intending to provide the narratives which make sense to the dominant forces in our world. In this case, however, that historian is me: an immigrant’s daughter, who is holding on to a culture and history that I know exists, but which I do not fully know.
Microhistory and the subaltern
Critical historiography and microhistory require one to “bend closer to the ground in order to pick up the traces of a subaltern life in its passage through time” (Guha 1987: 274). ). Inspired by ‘microhistories’ (see Carlo Ginzburg), this project is an experimentation and observation of what occurs outside the great simplifying narrative of History, and thus requires access to a repressed past.
‘Reproducing Narratives’ is an access point into a past that is not considered important, but which is my everything. I hope it invokes in others a desire to understand what lives were being lived outside the grand narrative of Indian history, and to imagine what this looked like. What mattered to the Marathi-Jewish diaspora in Mumbai, who was falling in love with who, where our grandparents ate breakfast and whether they liked the climate of Western India.
If we can, through remembering and imagining, evoke a more complicated history, then perhaps a more critical and free access to present reality and potential futures is also possible.
About the creator
Zenia Vasaiwalla