Building a community of memory keepers

Digital platforms are empowering people to share, document and archive their family histories through workshops and prompts

- Avantika Bhuyan

Here is an evocative story, titled My Nani's Paijeb, shared by Samriddhi Roy on the website of The Museum of Material Memory. The post from June 2020 delves into the memories associated with a pair of payals or anklets, which has been in the family for nearly 160 years. Roy's story does not just look at the familial history associated with the paijeb, but also etches a portrait of the lifestyle prevalent in a landowner's family in Munger district, Bihar, in the 1940s-50s. She then draws connections between the various women of the family as the jewel and its stories are passed down from generation to generation, with the author wearing it during her graduation in 2019.

On another website, Memorabilia: An Ode to Family History, you can find similar stories. In one post, Sambrita Chakraborty, a student of history at Jadavpur University, reminisces about her maternal uncle's home, or mamabari, in Behala, Kolkata, where she spent most of her childhood days. Of all the spaces in this house, the rooftop was the dearest to her. Especially striking there a cabinet, with its law books, and an old rotary phone on top. "It was long out of order and the line was disconnected. But my delight in turning the dial to hear the krik sound and importantly say 'Hello' into the receiver was no less than gobbling up cotton candy at a fair," she writes.