Life Members

Angana P. Chatterji

Angana P. Chatterji is the Founding Co-chair of the Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative at the Center for Race and Gender at University of California, Berkeley. Since April 2017 she has been a Research Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Stanford University. A cultural anthropologist, she focuses her work on issues of political conflict, majoritarian nationalism, and religion in the public sphere; gender, caste oppression, race, religion, and minoritization; and violence, accountability, and cultural survival. Rooted in local knowledge, witness testimony, and oral history, her collaborative research has facilitated the creation of new archives and bears witness to post/colonial, decolonial conditions of grief, dispossession, and agency. In Kashmir, Chatterji co-founded the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice (2008). Her collective work uncovered the unknown, unmarked, and mass graves, calling attention to the need for acknowledgement, justice, and accountability. In 2005, she co-convened the People’s Tribunal on Communalism in Orissa. She is a founding-member of the South Asia Feminist Preconference at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her publications include: Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (co-editor, 2019); Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal (lead editor, 2016); Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present (co-editor, 2012); Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (co-author, 2011); Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa (2009); and reports: Access to Justice for Women: India’s Response to Sexual Violence in Conflict and Social upheaval (co-author, 2015); BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Kashmir (lead author, 2009); Communalism in Orissa (lead author, 2006); and Without Land or Livelihood (lead author, 2004).

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Aniket Alam

Over the past decade he has been particularly interested in questions of Orality and Print cultures, and has been using Oral History methods to study historical transformations in the Himalayas. He runs the Highlands Histories Lab in IIIT which hopes to build competencies in historical methods, and computational tools through studies focussed on the Himalayas and other Asian Highlands.

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Ankur Agarwal

Ankur Agarwal, currently residing in Oslo, Norway, is an Independent Researcher and Writer and has assisted a French artist in collecting oral histories of migrant labourers (from Bihar and UP) in Bangalore.

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Avehi Menon

Avehi is currently the Director at Sarmaya, an online Museum. Avehi did her Masters in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester and later worked at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. She has also been a Curator at the Centre for Public History, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru and has helped built oral history archives for Indian Institute of Mathematical Science and the Economic and Political Weekly. Avehi has worked as a television producer, creating content for NDTV, Fox History, etc. She is currently the Vice President of OHAI.

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C S Lakshmi

C S Lakshmi has been an independent researcher in Women’s Studies for the past many years. She is also a Tamil writer writing under the pseudonym Ambai. She has been using oral history as a methodology in her works on women. Two of her books on artistes using oral history entitled The Singer and the Song and Mirrors and Gestures have been published by Kali for women. In 1988 she founded SPARROW (Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women) along with Dr Neera Desai and  Dr Maithreyi Krishna Raj, pioneer scholars and academics in Women’s Studies.  Oral history is SPARROW’s anchor project and based on oral history many books have been published and many oral history documentaries have been produced by SPARROW.

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Debanjan Mitra

Debanjan is an oral history enthusiast and loves to explore the intricate microhistories that are endangered and often bear the threat to become extinct. He has special interest in the folklores of South Asia. His article based on the oral history narrative of Jagannath and Bimala titled, “How Queer are Our Gods: Interrogating the Story of Jagannatha and Bimala” has been published in the volume South Asian Literature, Culture and History: An Interpretative Exegesis (2019).  The article tries to explore how the Jagannatha iconoclasm evolved out of tribal roots and cultures existing in the Odisha region despite its wide Bramhanisation by the majoritarian pro-Hindu elites. The paper also brings out the complex cultural hegemonic power-play that Aryanisation had done to the erstwhile tribal God by the Vaishnavite culture of the region and how such a move has endangered Jagannatha’s previous cultural identity.

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Debarati Chakraborty

Debarati completed her Ph.D from the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University. An oral history enthusiast, she has worked as a part-time field investigator at the Department of History, Jadavpur University in a SEPHIS funded digital archive project “Remembering the Native Place: A Nucleus of Social Memory among the People Displaced by Partition of India (1947),”. She was a Guest Faculty at the Department of Comparative Literature at West Bengal State University, Barasat in 2015. From 2015 to 2017, she was a Guest Faculty in the Centre for Studies in African Literatures and Cultures, Jadavpur University. She joined the Department of English, Techno India University, West Bengal as an Assistant Professor in 2017, where she is the Head of the Department at present. She is currently the Vice President of OHAI.

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Fleur D’Souza

Ph.D in History, Fleur was Associate Professor of History for over 27 years, and then was the Vice Principal of the Arts faculty at St. Xavier’s College, University of Mumbai. Fleur in her teachings has extensively used Oral History as a pedagogical tool. She has conducted interviews of different communities in Mumbai including interviews of residents of Dharavi Island. One of her areas of interest has been colonial studies. She was formerly the Vice President of OHAI.

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Indira Chowdhury

Indira has a Ph.D. in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Formerly a professor of English at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, Indira’s academic interests include oral history, cultural studies and lexicography. Indira has helped build archival resources at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai and has curated several exhibitions. Her book “The Frail Hero and Virile History” was awarded the Tagore prize in 2001. In 2010 her book on Homi Bhabha titled “A Masterful Spirit: Homi Bhabha 1909-1966”, was released by Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, former President of India. Indira works relentlessly for the promotion of the discipline of Oral History and has been the founding member and Secretary, OHAI (2013), and the President of OHAI (2013-2016). She was also the President of the International Oral History Association (2014-16).

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Karen L. Donoghue

K. Lalita

K. Lalita is a feminist scholar- activist for several decades. She was founder-president of India’s first feminist group, the Progressive Organisation of Women (POW); founder –member of Stree Shakti Sanghatana (SSS) a feminist group; and founder-coordinator and currently with Anveshi – Research Centre of Women’s Studies. K. Lalita, is co-author and editor of “We were making History,” the first oral history study done in India, was a documentation of peasant women’s participation in Telangana Peasant Armed Struggle (1989); “Women Writing in India from 600 BC to the 20th Century,” (2 volumes,1990,91); “Taking Charge of our Bodies”, a book on the politics of women’s health & Medical system (2004); co-author and editor, “Rupture, Loss and Living: Minority Women Speak about Post-conflict Life” (2016). Her publications in Telugu, “Manaku Teliyani Mana Charitra” (1986); “Savalaksha Sandehalu” (1990); have had significant impact on the Telugu public culture as well as among the secular progressive circles in the Telugu speaking region of Andhra. She assisted the well-known feminist sociologist Maria Mies, in research based on oral interviews with women in the rural and tribal areas of Andhra and Telangana,  that resulted in producing two important texts, “Indian Women in Subsistence and Agricultural Sector” (ILO, 1986), and “The Lace Makers of Narsapur” (1982 ). She recently published a biography of her parents “Antham Varaku Anantham” (2017),that examines the life struggles of a freedom fighter (Indian independence) and his spouse, in subsequent decades creating a backdrop for her own existence as an activist. She has published in a well- known feminist journal Bhumika, of which she is advisory committee member. Almost all her work has been either completely or partially based on Oral History methodology.

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Kala Sundar

Kala, a resident of Bengaluru, is a freelance translator of Russian with interest in the oral history of senior citizens.

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Mahesh Sharma

Apart from numerous research papers in prominent peer-reviewed journals and book-chapters, Prof. Sharma is the author of Western Himalayan Temple Records: State, Pilgrimage, Ritual and Legality in Chamba, (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2009); The Realm of Faith: Subversion, Appropriation and Dominance in the Western Himalaya (Shimla: IIAS, 2001); and co-editor, Indian Painting: Themes, Histories, Interpretations, (Ahmedabad: Mapin; Ocean, NJ: Grantha Corporation, 2013). Presently, Mahesh Sharma is working on the western Himalayan women’s song about daily drudgery, pain, suicide, and honour killings.

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Malvika Bhatia

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Meeta Deka

Meeta  Deka,   Professor and Former Head of the  Department of History , Gauhati University, has the following publications to her name, Urbanisms in South Asia: Northeast India Outside-In   2020 (Primus Books Pvt.Ltd.), Women’s Agency and Social Change:  Assam and Beyond 2013 (Sage Publications Pvt.Ltd.) Student Movements in Assam  1996 (Vikas Publishing House  Pvt.Ltd.) , etc. Besides this, her chapters on important topics have been published in books and  several papers in national and international journals. Her interest in Oral History dates back to the early 1990s for her PhD  work and since then she has engaged in Oral History as an important source to retrieve the subaltern and marginalized into the pages of history. She has guided fifteen PhD and three MPhil scholars till date and has  encouraged them to explore oral sources. She is involved in Oral History workshops and lectures for colleges and universities. She  completed a University Grants Commission project (2013-14) on Ecological Crisis and Marginalization of Traditional Livelihood vis a vis Women in Tribal Societies of  Assam using oral sources and is currently working on the oral history of border communities of Arunachal Pradesh.

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Nandini Oza

Nandini is a writer, chronicler and an archivist. She is a former activist of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA). Lately, her primary focus has been on recording the Oral History of the struggle around the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) in the Narmada Valley in the voices of key leaders of the movement. She is engaged in bringing the oral histories so collected out in public domain. The book, ‘Ladha Narmadecha’, (Struggle for Narmada), based on the oral histories of two tribal leaders of the NBA in Marathi is an outcome of this work and so is the Oral History Narmada website. Nandini is currently the President of OHAI.

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Neekee Chaturvedi

She is also working on a research project of Chair for National Integration and Sikh Studies, University of Rajasthan, titled A Historical survey of the Gurudwaras and Ajmer. She served as Secretary of Rajasthan University Women’s Association and is also a theatre artist. She is currently an executive member in OHAI.

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Pooja Sagar

She is trained in oral history under the mentorship of scholars such as Rob Perks and Alessandro Portelli through the Center for Public History, Srishti Manipal University, Bengaluru and British Council. She started working on Oral history projects in 2013, beginning with the oral history of settler communities in Andamans to Syrian Christian family histories and now currently working on oral histories of vaids, doctors and patients in contemporary medical practice. She was a Research Associate and Project fellow, Culture Industries Asia Research Program (CIDASIA), and former doctoral scholar, at the CSCS, Bengaluru. She was faculty and Head of Studies for Creative Writing Program at Srishti Manipal Institute, Bengaluru (2011-2022). And currently, anchors the Word Lab and Library teams at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru. She was a Joint Secretary (2016-17) and Executive Member of OHAI (2022-23).

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Pramod Kumar Srivastava

A well-known and renowned historian, Prof. Pramod Kumar Srivastava is also a pioneer in the field of oral history. Prof. Srivastava is the founding member and the 1^st President of Oral History Association of India. Prof. Srivastava obtained his doctorate on American Imperialism in Philippines (1983), and D.Lit. on the Struggle for Existence of British Colonies of South Pacific Islands, Fiji Islands, Solomon Islands, Islands of New Hebrides and Tonga (1990) from the University of Lucknow. He joined the Western History Department of Lucknow University as a Research Associate in 1983 and was appointed lecturer in 1994. He was promoted as Professor in 2007 and retired as the Head of the Department in 2015. He then became Emeritus Fellow (UGC), 2015-2017. Prof. Srivastava has headed many research projects including on oral histories. For example Oral History of Freedom Struggle with special reference to Ex-Andaman Freedom Fighters; Segregating Dangerous Ideas: Colonial and Criminal Justice in the Andaman Islands and Political Protests from Behind the Bars: Escapes, Assaults, Work and Hunger Strikes in British Colonial Prisons. Prof. Srivastava has been an important contributor at various national and international conferences and he has presented research papers on several important subjects like, Freedom, Peace, Gandhi, Revolt in Kala Paani, Oral History of Japanese Occupation of Andaman Islands, etc. He is also credit with several research papers and articles on the freedom movement. His publications include, Hunger Strike in Andaman: Repression and Resistance of Transported Prisoners in Cellular Jail; Mahatma Betrayed; Destination Oceania; Kalapani (Hindi and Oriya); and Shiv Verma – Associate of Bhagat Singh.

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Preeti Raghunath

Preeti Raghunath is an Assistant Professor at the Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication (SIMC), Pune. She is the author of the book, ‘Community Radio Policies in South Asia: A Deliberative Policy Ecology Approach’, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. She has an abiding interest in oral cultures and histories in South Asia, and hopes to work in the realm further.

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Rajib Handique

Professor Rajib Handique is the Dean, Faculty of Arts, and Professorat Department of History, Gauhati University. Prof. Rajib Handique’s main work relates to the History of Modern India and Environmental History, with one of his main research projects being, Ecology and Society in Post-Colonial Assam with Special Reference to Upper Assam. His book, British Forest Policy in Assam, was published in 2004. His papers and research articles have been published in various volumes and journals. He is currently (2019-22) also the President of the Governing Body,Midnapore College, West Bengal and Member, Advisory Committee, Centre for Environmental Science, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal.

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Rama Lakshmi

Rama Lakshmi is a journalist, musicologist and an oral historian. She was the India correspondent of The Washington Post for 27 years, and won a prestigious American award for her coverage of the 2004 tsunami. A museum studies graduate and a trained oral historian, she has worked with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Missouri History Museum and the Science Center in St. Louis. In India, she has consulted with the National Museum, National Rail Museum and the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art. She is also the curator of the Remember Bhopal Museum, which opened in December 2014 to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the deadly Union Carbide gas leak. She has deployed oral histories in her curatorial strategy. Rama has studied feminist politics, refugee rights and the American civil rights movement. She has also conducted oral histories with the activists of the disability rights movement in the United States. In India, she has conducted oral history sessions with RTI activists and old IIC members. She is also the editor of VARTA, OHAI’s newsletter.

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Rimi Tadu

Rimi Tadu is an independent researcher and writer. She uses the oral history method in her research projects on writing the local history of indigenous communities in the North East, primarily in Arunachal Pradesh. For instance, documenting the historical accounts of resistance and subjugation of Apatani community against Indian state in late 40s, the formation of Christian community in a traditional society of Arunachal, and documenting and tracing the transformations in land and gender relation. Recently, she is documenting the local history of the 1962 India-China War among the borderland communities. She is a former fellow at Max Weber College, Erfurt University, postdoctoral fellow with International Centre for Advanced Studies: Metamorphosis of Political, Institute of Economic Growth, and was teaching at Jamia Millia Islamia.

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S. Bharat

Bharat is currently Archivist at the French Institute of Pondicherry. He was formerly the lead researcher for the Kolkata Urban Archive, an archive of activist histories of Kolkata created under the aegis of the Tacit Urban Research Network. With a background in literature and sociology, he has an interest in urban history, social movements, music, and Indian literature.

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Saaz Aggarwal

Saaz listens to people and writes their stories. Her main work is with elderly Sindhis, recording their memories of life in Sindh just before, during and soon after Partition, and this has been published in the form of books, blogs, YouTube videos, and on-line encyclopaedia entries. Ms. Aggarwal’s body of work includes biographies, translations and humour columns. For more information see: http://www.saazaggarwal.com/

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Sanghamitra Chatterjee

Sanghmitra is the founding member of Past Perfect Heritage Management, an archiving and research agency based out of Mumbai, which specialises in institutional and family archiving. She is currently the Joint Secretary of OHAI.

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Sarmistha Dutta Gupta

She received the literary award ‘Sudha Basu Smarak Purashkar’ from Paschimbanga Bangla Academy for her book Pather Ingit: Nirbachito Sambad-Samayikpatrey Bangali Meyer Samajbhavna 1927-67 (Women’s Non-Fiction Writings and Social Change in Bengal 1927-67, Stree 2007) and has been a Charles Wallace India Trust research grantee (2011) for her work on ‘The History of Girls’ Schooling and Education in Bengal: 1900-1950’ done under aegis of Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK). In 2020, Sarmistha curated an installation exhibition called ‘Ways of Remembering Jallianwala Bagh and Rabindranath Tagore’s Response to the Massacre’ in collaboration with Sanchayan Ghosh and the Victoria Memorial Hall and is now engaged in completing her book The Jallianwala Bagh Journals. Local and oral histories from Amritsar have played a major role in this work of hers. She has also worked specifically on oral history projects that have traced the journeys of institutions like IIM Joka and the National Council of Education, Kolkata, with Prof. Indira Chowdhury spearheading both. Sarmistha is at present an executive committee member of OHAI.

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Soma Paul

Soma has always been interested to integrate oral history with the domain of Education. During her internship workshop with OHAI, she created a proposal for a project that aims at creating a series of Biographical records and interprets those records with the aim of learning from the life and work of others. Following that idea she has conducted preliminary interviews with eminent educationist Dr. Gurveen Kaur.

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Sudebi Thakurta

Sudebi Thakurata is a narrative designer, creative facilitator, educator, writer and futurist. She designs experiences, engagements and environments that allow people to think, have dialogue, make their thinking and interaction visible and thus enable them to design their own solutions and narratives using different modes and media. A faculty member at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, for over a decade, Sudebi is also a Creative Facilitator of SEAΔ, a trans-national cross-cultural leadership programme curated by Mekong Cultural Hub and British Council. A global UNLEASH talent, mentor of many global innovation programmes, Sudebi has co-founded the transdisciplinary design collective and started a unique pedagogy, art and design led trans-local initiative “The Archival City- a Site of Learning’. During the times of Pandemic she started a global initiative deeply rooted in the power of stories, orality, inquiries, narratives and experiential perspectives.  Sudebi emphasises socially, environmentally and culturally relevant issues, inter-weaving design, imagination, complex systems thinking, pedagogy, visual and performing arts, oral history, ethnography and research to design possibilities which are inclusive and transformative. Many of these projects use orality and memory as sources of wisdom in framing complex problems and designing solutions. 

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Surajit Sarkar

Surajit is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Centre for Community Knowledge at Ambedkar University, Delhi. He has created weekly television programmes as well as award winning documentary and educational films. Surajit has worked as a video artist for theatre and dance productions, and has created multimedia installations in museums and galleries in India and abroad. He has been creating exhibitions of lived histories of Delhi, as Neighbourhood Museums. He has been the President of OHAI from 2017-19.

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Suroopa Mukherjee

Suroopa Mukherjee teaches English literature at Hindu College, Delhi University, Delhi, and has done research on oral history, campaigns for the victims (particularly the women survivors) of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy and has also published a literary fiction. She was a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (2005-2008). Her book Surviving Bhopal: Dancing Bodies, Written Texts, Oral Testimonials of Women in the Wake of an Industrial Disaster. Palgrave Studies in Oral History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) has been widely acclaimed. She is founder member of the Oral History Association of India. She has been staff advisor of a student group set up in Delhi University We for Bhopal, which brought out an in-house magazine Hinterland and made a 23 minutes documentary film titled Closer to Reality. She writes extensively as an academic and campaigner/activist for the cause of justice for survivors of state repression and corporate crime. Mukherjee’s most recent work are non-fiction adventure stories (a set of 4 books) based on manmade and natural disasters for 14+ children, published by Terri.

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Veena Poonacha

Veena is currently project consultant to the Kodava Sahitya Academy for the project, Documentation and Dissemination of the Histories and Cultures of Indigenous Communities in Kodagu using Participatory Research Methods. The project aims to recover oral histories, oral traditions and private papers from indigenous communities displaced by the ecological devastation since 2018.  She retired as Director of Research Centre for Women’s Studies (RCWS) SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, on March 2015.   Her work on oral histories/oral traditions are as follows, Women in the Coorg Society: A Study of Status and Experience through the Use of Folk Songs, Proverbs, Myths and Genealogies, a book titled, “From the Land of a Thousand Hills: Portraits of Three Generation Kodagu Women. By SPARROW, “Oral Histories of Women Achievers”, in Grass Roots Divas, a  commemorative volume published by the Indian Merchant’s Chamber (Ladies’ Wing), Mumbai, , “Women Resist  Indigenous Cultural Oppression in Gadchroli” International Feminist Journal of Politics , etc. Veena is the founder of Dr. Avabai Wadia and Dr. Bomanji Kurshedji Wadia Archives for Women  to preserve oral histories and private papers of women at the Research Centre for Women’s Studies, SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai.

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Venkat Srinivasan

Currently the Chief Archivist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) and a researcher, Venkat previously worked at the National Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre in the USA, where he started his work on interviews of scientists, engineers and ancillary staff who worked on the particle accelerator. Venkat is currently the treasurer of OHAI.

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Vinita Sinha

Vinita Sinha is a researcher , translator and author teaching English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has been associated with Oral History research work since 2015. She was awarded the Major Research Project by University Grants Commission to work on Subversive Voices in Oral Traditions of North Bihar. The project was completed in 2018 and her book based on the said research is underway. She had presented twice at OHAI Annual Conferences in Bangalore and at Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has presented her research on Oral histories of Madhubani art and artists at International Conferences in India , UK, Italy, Cyprus and Portugal. Her research articles related to the question of Orality and its significance in Folk literature have been published in national and international journals. As Coordinator of the Translation and Translation Studies at IP College, she is the Faculty Advisor for the Annual Students‘ Journal, CODE.

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Vrunda Pathare

Vrunda is the chief archivist at the Godrej Archives. Earlier she worked as Assistant Archivist at TIFR Archives of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Ms. Pathare is a member of the Steering Committee of Section on Business Archives and Labour of International Council of Archives (France) and formerly a member of the Advisory Board of Rajbhavan Archives (Govt. of Maharashtra, India). She has been the founding member of OHAI and currently the Secretary of OHAI.

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