Rediscovering your backyard

After months of one-and-off lockdowns and travel restrictions, tourists are gingerly venturing out again. In this backdrop, we explore how a bunch of dedicated ‘local historians’ are gently helping people notice all the wonders closer home.

A file photo of the GTS observatory in Kannur 

What is the stuff of history? Is it the grand narrative alone that is to occupy our mindspace? History with a capital H, so to speak — the kind that chronicles an emperor’s achievements, a dynasty’s ascendance/decline or the larger-than-life account of a nation or a region? Is there a place in it for the localised, the specific and the odds and ends that are important to smaller communities and settlements? Admittedly, it is the awe-inspiring account that attracts our attention. And when history is spoken of, it is its grandeur that comes to our mind.

But, quietly, without creating too much of a spectacle, a new kind of history has crept into public consciousness — what goes by the name of ‘local history’. In these pandemic-ridden times, this is perhaps the silver lining the much-battered travel and tourism industry ought to pay more attention to.

An exploration of home

A few months ago, this newspaper ran an article on a few relics of that grand project of the 19th century — the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) — that still stood in Bengaluru. As it turned out, one such relic (an old structure dating back to the 1860s) was right there, in my own neighbourhood.

The GTS itself has been much researched and written about. It was an ambitious project that attempted to measure all of the sub-continent with scientific precision. It began in 1802 and was completed in 1871. Among its accomplishments were the demarcation of the British territories in India and the measurement of the height of Mount Everest. But the specifics of its connection with the cities, towns, villages, grasslands, marshes and forests where the nuts and bolts of this exercise were carried out, is not the stuff of the grand historical narrative, which prefers to dwell in the realm of the larger picture and talk about those accomplishments and not about what went into the making of it.

And yet, there it was in front of me, the GTS Observatory in Kannur in Bengaluru, which according to the article, had been constructed to re-measure the baseline in order to enable the GTS to continue to chug along smoothly and complete its breathtaking endeavour.

That this structure had been conserved and its story brought into the public eye was owing to the efforts of a bunch of dedicated people, who had painstakingly identified the very local remnant of a larger story, preserved it and popularised it. And that, in a nutshell, is perhaps the local historian’s job description, or more accurately, passion description.

Hunting for the backstory

The local historian recognises that the larger picture is composed of many smaller ones, which are embedded into the larger one, but which when viewed from up close, are complete and fully formed in their own right, even as they contribute to the larger one. ‘History in our backyard’ is what the local historian both brings ‘home’ and keeps at home for all of us. And this backyard history could take several forms — it could be the identification or preservation of a local structure and the unearthing of its backstory; it could be the narration of the story of a locality, a road, a prominent local personality or anything else that innovatively focuses people’s attention on their backyard and connects it to the larger picture. These connections are made through a variety of ways. Besides the printed word, heritage walks, exhibitions, walking tours, classes in educational institutions and so on, are all arrows in the local historian’s quiver. Of course, a generous helping of enthusiasm is de rigueur.

And if one is wondering why at all should it be done, as Meera Iyer, who, along with her teammates at INTACH, was deeply involved in the preservation of the GTS Observatory, puts it, “…when people know the story behind something, they build a connection with ‘it’ — whether it is a street, a building or a locality. It changes the way they look at it. They appreciate it and maybe even love it and then they will care about it.”

The ‘real’ vocal about local

Given that global travel has increased considerably in the last three decades since a man in a blue turban liberalised the economy, it might seem obvious to make the claim that it is this globetrotting that has given many Indians a taste of how London and Paris are very good at dressing up their local history. Having got a taste of that, many returned to the old country with an idea to do something on similar lines in their cities too. And thus, local history, in the form of walking tours, locality histories, heritage walks and so on was born. Or so goes the legend.

But consider this. If you have ever driven out of the city to places in the countryside with its inevitable old temple or some other local monument, chances are that a hawker would have approached you with a little booklet with ‘Sthala Purana’ printed on it. These ‘sthala puranas’, which are extremely popular in South India, are the traditional stories of particular localities, villages, and temples or to put it differently, they are ‘local histories’. And so, when a raconteur is narrating tales of a locality in Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata or where-have-you, isn’t she in effect giving you the ‘sthala purana’ of the place, really?

More than storytelling

To state that local historians are merely storytellers is to belittle the vast scope of their work. Beyond narrating the local ‘story’ in ‘history’, the local historian also plays an important role in heritage preservation.

Mustansir Dalvi of Mumbai is a man of many accomplishments. A published poet and translator as well as a professor of architecture, he has conducted doctoral research on the city’s Art Deco structures, taught and lectured extensively on the history of its architecture and also written on it in both the popular and academic press. His interest is in exploring ideas of the changing urban landscape in the city and he has been a big supporter of the heritage conservation movement in Mumbai, since its start in the early 1990s. His prime motivation, he says, comes from being a citizen who loves the city of Mumbai and he does what he does mainly to create awareness about architectural heritage and the need for conservation. He believes that one can read these buildings as texts for our contemporary times.

In a city like Mumbai, or for that matter, any big city the world over, the real-estate market, in its quest for more and more prime land, is often at the forefront of attempting to undermine the value of architectural heritage. In trying to preserve these structures and more importantly, spread the word about their value, the local historian is performing a valuable historical service.

INTACH recently completed the restoration of the Fort High School in Bengaluru, something that they had first initiated in 2011. Raising funds for the project took the better part of a decade before work could actually commence. INTACH convenors over the years have also lobbied steadily with government officials at the Urban Development department to notify regulations for heritage structures. These were finally notified in April 2020, but effective implementation of the rules is what will ensure that heritage structures are preserved.

Vikramjit Rooprai, who lives and works in Delhi, identifies as a ‘Heritage Activist’ and says that he has made talking about heritage the nucleus of his teaching. To this end, he both conducts workshops and organises heritage walks and is actively involved in popularising history.

The role of social media

The role of social media in popularising local history narratives has proved to be quite remarkable. Many Facebook groups and Twitter and Instagram handles are doing an exemplary job at disseminating local historical information. Often, a photograph or a memory serves to trigger several discussions, thereby creating a valuable archive. Groups on Facebook like ‘Bangalore — Photos from a Bygone Age’, ‘Hyderabad Trails’ and ‘Oh Bombay!’ have built up an impressive corpus of photographs and memories about their cities and are veritable treasure houses of information.

The leap to the larger

How does local history connect with the larger narratives of history? For instance, Rooprai says, “I talk of South Asian History and I consider it as my local history,” clearly choosing to look further even while he talks about his immediate.

Consider the GTS, for instance. The observatory, for instance, could be the beginning of a deep dive into the entire exercise, which was intended to serve the exploitative purposes of colonialism, but which also created a huge corpus of knowledge about the sub-continent. The GTS served as the trigger to other similar exercises — the Botanical and Zoological Surveys, the Archaeological Survey, the Linguistic Survey and of course, the Census — all of which have played a huge part in the framing of the modern Indian nation state. A skilled historian can connect all of these stories to form a narrative that quite literally begins in one’s backyard and travels across the world in its bid to explain the motivations of colonialism and how it came to dominate large parts of the globe.

Similarly, one could begin with a minor not-so-popular monument or building and use it to sketch the entire story of a king, a dynasty, a time-period, a literature and bring many things alive.

This is history home-delivered, quite literally.

Going beyond school history

Meera Iyer, Dalvi and Rooprai all vehemently agree that the larger public is extremely supportive of their work and have often gone out of their way to support them. Their workshops, walks, exhibitions and appeals for funds have all found enthusiastic takers consistently. This belies the popular perception that history in school is a ‘boring’ subject and most people are glad to see the back of it once they finish school. Clearly, history as an area of interest does not lose its zing for many, no matter what their experience of it in school is and people are eager to engage with it. This poses an interesting challenge for curriculum makers and history teachers.

Among the things that have been said about history is that its excessive emphasis on names, dates and facts have, to an extent, killed the spirit of the subject and rendered it a test of memory rather than one of understanding patterns, movements and change. And then there is the tendency to hark back to a mythical ‘glorious past’ to communicate the minutiae of the discipline. This has resulted in a history shorn of nuance.

Can the ‘sthala purana’ approach to history be used to creatively take the subject out of its boring academic shell and transform it into a living, throbbing entity that vibes well with the general populace? Could this backyard history approach prove to be the equivalent of the laboratory method used in pure sciences? Could we begin by asking these questions, at the least?

The author is a publishing professional who writes on literature, language and history.