About
We are born and have our being in a place of memory. We chart our lives by everything we remember from the mundane moments to the majestic. We know ourselves through the art and act of remembering.
– bell hooks, Belonging. A Culture of Place, 2009
The establishment of Irani Chai, Mumbai coincided with the arrival of Web 2.0. We were enthused by Cohen and Rosenzweig’s 2005 work Digital History and the potential that emerging platforms such as blogs and web sites offered in new ways to engage with history. For the first time, online archives that had a global reach could be created by anyone with access to a computer and an internet connection. We set to work undertaking oral history interviews in Mumbai and listened to many people share their stories.
In using oral history, we had the opportunity to start to grasp the experience of these cafés as a working world and a social space of interaction; and how they have come to be remembered over time through personal memory and in film, poetry and visual art. For some, the cafes represented an ‘older’, less coarse and more cosmopolitan Bombay.
The use of oral history with non-elite classes was just starting to be considered a legitimate research method by many in the Indian history academy when we set-out in 2006. Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar’s ground-breaking oral history of Mumbai’s millworkers One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices was published in 2004, the first oral history of its kind in India. Today, India is awash with people doing projects that use oral history and the Oral History Association of India (OHAI) is a national organisation with a dynamic membership base.
Around the same time that OHAI was established in 2013, projects driven by social media appeared online and street-level activity such as walking tours began to grow in popularity in Mumbai and elsewhere. These opened spaces in which many more voices can express the personal meanings they find in their local landscape, with some participants challenging previously held notions of where ‘heritage’ resides and who can ‘make’ history. Our links below offer some of our favourite examples of these.
Since day one, Irani Chai, Mumbai has been firmly grounded in the belief that the power in oral history to understand the past on personal and collective levels can offer all of us access to the memory archives of many people previously denied their historical voice.
Today, Irani Chai, Mumbai contains a collection of oral history interviews and articles, an archive of film and news media clippings, and news blog posts. The interest shown in the project from all corners of the globe has not declined in the 15 years since the site was launched.
