1. Dr. Indira Chowdhury
Indira Chowdhury 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. She 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).
2. Avehi Menon
Avehi Menon is Archive Director at Sarmaya Arts Foundation (https://sarmaya.in/). Sarmaya is a digital museum with a multi genre collection. Avehi completed her Masters in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester. An oral historian, she was previously Curator at the Centre for Public History (CPH), Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru. At CPH, she built oral history archives for institutions and led public history projects. Additionally, Avehi spent ten years as a television producer, developing content for NDTV, Fox History and others. Her areas of interest are urban and community histories and creating immersive, community engagement. She was Treasurer at OHAI (2014-2016) and is currently the Vice President of OHAI.
3. Vrunda Pathare
Vrunda Pathare is the chief archivist at the Godrej Archives (http://www.archives.godrej.com/). Earlier she worked as Assistant Archivist at TIFR Archives of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. She 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 a founding member of OHAI and is currently the Secretary of OHAI.
4. Dr. Debarati Chakraborty
Debarati Chakraborty completed her Ph.D from the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. An oral history enthusiast, she has worked as a 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 and later, she was attached with the Centre for Studies in African Literatures and Cultures, Jadavpur University as a Guest Faculty. She joined the Department of English, Techno India University, West Bengal as an Assistant Professor, where she is now the Head of the Department. She is currently the Vice President of OHAI.
5. Dr. Fleur D’Souza
Ph.D in History, Fleur retired after 32 years of service at St. Xavier’s Mumbai as Associate Professor of History and Head of Department. Vice Principal of the Arts faculty for two terms, at St. Xavier’s College, 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 people on Dharavi Island. Some of her areas of interest: colonial studies, maritime history and community studies. She was formerly the Vice President of OHAI.
6. Venkat Srinivasan
Venkat Srinivasan is a visiting researcher and archivist at the Archives, National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore. The Archives at NCBS (http://archives.ncbs.res.in/) is a public collecting space for the history of contemporary biology in India. Prior to this, he was a research engineer at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, where he also started his work on interviews of scientists, engineers and ancillary staff who worked on the particle accelerator. He is an independent science writer, with work in The Atlantic and Scientific American online, Nautilus, Aeon, Wired, and the Caravan. Venkat is currently the treasurer of OHAI.
7. Surajit Sarkar
Surajit Sarkar is currently Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Centre for Community Knowledge at Ambedkar University, Delhi. He has worked in a variety of settings and institutions to collect oral narratives, knowledge and history. These include the Gulael Kala Karvaan (Catapult Arts Caravan) collecting agricultural practices and change in the Satpura region of Madhya Pradesh (www.jatantrust.org/caravan); the Konyak Wanglam Nyoiching (Heritage Centre) in Mon, Nagaland collecting oral histories and cultural memories; the Neighbourhood Museum Programme in Delhi collects narratives of everyday life to create local exhibitions of lived histories of Delhi (http://www.delhimemories.in/). Surajit was the President of OHAI from 2017-19.
8. Saaz Aggarwal
Saaz Aggarwal listens to people and writes their stories. She has done this with many elderly Sindhis, recording their memories of life in Sindh just before, during and soon after Partition. These accounts have been published in the form of books, blogs, YouTube videos, and on-line encyclopaedia entries. Saaz’s body of work includes biographies, translations and humour columns. For more information, see http://www.saazaggarwal.com/
9. Sanghamitra Chatterjee
Sanghamitra Chatterjee 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 (http://www.pastperfect.co.in/our-work.html). She is currently the Joint Secretary of OHAI.
10. Nandini Oza
Nandini Oza 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 the 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 website: https://oralhistorynarmada.in/. She is currently the President of OHAI.