Kerala - Kannur

More families are now writing their history

KANNUR: The initiative of the Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR) to promote local history has inspired many families and individuals to write their histories on their own, says P.J. Cherian, Director of the council.

Presenting his paper on the writing of local history at the Indian History Congress session on Tuesday, Dr. Cherian said the responses to the initiative were an indication that family history writing was gaining popularity among the mainstream castes and communities of the State. Nearly 70 per cent of the family histories in the KCHR archives belonged to Syrian Christians, who roughly constituted 16 per cent of the population. Dalit family history was conspicuous by its absence in the archives.

The ‘Biography Writing’ project launched in 2004-05 sought to document the life history of women, Dalits and Adivasis in Kerala, with the support of intellectual resources pooled from various disciplines and social categories. But the project failed to generate enthusiasm, he said.

Stating that local history was one of the focal areas of research at the KCHR, he said the History Walk Project-I held in 2001 as a summer vacation activity for school students across the State generated more than 2,000 local history reports. The History Walk Project-II was organised last year to elicit the changes and continuities in the human-nature relationship in the localities being studied. Many schools published their reports and some transformed them into visual formats.

“These projects enabled the participants to explore history, often touching and feeling the life in history,” Dr. Cherian said. The experience seemed to have oriented the participants towards a new understanding of memory as an organic phenomenon rather than as a settled individual faculty.

The KCHR’s project for the older generation to collect proverbs, mathematical puzzles and local humour transmitted down generations by word of mouth in each locality had also evoked a huge response, Dr. Cherian said. Nearly 700 senior citizens, including non-resident Keralites, had participated. The campaign for collecting family histories and biographies and autobiographies had also generated public interest, he said. The archives could gather 243 family histories and over 500 biographies and autobiographies.

Dr. Cherian said that despite the notion that women had a meaningful role in families, they were almost invisible in family histories. The Village History Project, aimed at helping local bodies in writing the village history, provided some insights into the challenges and possibilities of local history writing.

The KCHR’s initiatives also included projects on the history of Malayali migrations and migrant communities, creation of a database on the social reformers of Kerala and the collection of political slogans raised during various socio-political struggles in the State, Dr. Cherian added.

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