Where are India's Oral History departments?

As Bharat steps confidently into its Amrit Kaal by working towards the idea of Viksit Bharat, it is imperative to reflect on how Bharat and Bhartiya remember and record their past.

- SANTISHREE DHULIPUDI PANDIT

As Bharat steps confidently into its Amrit Kaal by working towards the idea of Viksit Bharat, it is imperative to reflect on how Bharat and Bhartiya remember and record their past. In a country that has long relied on Shruti (which is heard) and Smriti (which is remembered), it is both ironic and tragic that our higher education institutions (HEIs) have no Oral History departments.

The same land where stories flowed across generations through songs, legends, temples, and educational discourses now relies almost solely on textual records, most of which were shaped not by us but by colonial hands. Furthermore, the Western civilizations that lacked vast oral traditions of their own have ironically taken the lead in institutionalizing Oral History as a field of study; all this while, we, the inheritors of one of the richest oral civilizations, are looking the other way.

This absence is not simply a policy oversight but a much deeper malaise of intellectual neglect, perhaps even engineered erasure of historical and civilizational success. It raises uncomfortable yet pertinent questions: why do we treat oral testimony as less credible than colonial and foreign archives in a land where epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata were orally transmitted for centuries? Why do our institutions, especially our universities, continue to treat our traditional modes of remembering as inferior, anecdotal, or unacademic?

Perhaps the answer may lie in the long shadow cast by a certain ideological capture of post-Independence Indian historiography.