 While it is important to share our own stories, we need to develop a balance between speaking and listening. If we speak too much, we may hijack or steal the conversation and our participants may not be able to share their narratives. Moreover, a balanced conversation allows us to listen carefully to what is spoken and to reflect on the interpretation going on in our heads as we listen. This kind of reflexivity is important in interviews because what is said is not always the same as what is heard and understood. Like observation, listening to is an interpretive exercise. We may hear the words just as they are spoken, but the meanings and references that we draw are very much constructed. Sometimes speaking out what we think helps clarify any differences between our understanding and the participants' expressions. And it helps to share our understanding with the participants so that we may build on it together. A wonderful example of this kind of reflexivity is seen in the work of Archal Malhotra. Archal listens intently to her participants and actively reflects on what they are saying. These reflections become a part of her representation. Let us hear from Archal about the role of listening and reflexivity in her work. Hello, my name is Archal Malhotra. I am an over-historian of memory and material culture. I work with objects and the memory they embody, but an inanimate object cannot speak. It does not have any emotions of its own. So any importance that an object may hold is deposited into it by people and as time passes, the meaning of these objects change with every passing generation. The period I focus on is of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. While studying the migration of 14 million people to either side of the border, I often contemplated the notion of home and what it might have felt like to flee from it hastily. For many years I travelled across India, Pakistan and the UK looking for things that refugees brought with them. The objects that became their companions on the way to a new citizenship. From things as simple banal and mundane as household items to those of obvious monetary precious value. Such an artifact would be a reservoir of memory and experience and its physical weight would be outweighed by the emotional weight cashed into it over the years. So such an object would in some ways occupy the weight of the past. My project is called Remnants of a Separation and it is not just about objects from another time but a collated experience of the object's physical and metaphysical potential. I wanted to know what it felt like to hold in one's hand a tangible part of one's history. Particularly if that history was now on the other side of an impenetrable international militarized border. How did people look at these things? Were these things prized possessions or something too mundane to be considered of value? And most importantly, could these objects be used as a guide for recollection? Could they be propagators of the past? I strive to look at the notion of belonging through belongings. To appreciate the object in its totality not as something that blends into the landscape of the past but as a primary character around which the entire landscape is arranged. We often see that as memory passes and as the years pass, our emotions settle into objects in a way that they become physical evidences of belonging to a certain place at a certain time. The object expands to transcend its own physicality by creating a tangible link to an untangible place or state of being. Things, mundane things like books and shawls and pencil cases and hand-painted boxes and pocket knives or valuable things like jewellery or even documents and ID cards remain incredibly important yet unexplored means of understanding personal and collective histories. By unfolding memories woven within materiality, my work unravels a deeper understanding of the personal narratives around partition. And though the object remains at the centre, what emerges through such a storytelling is social ethnography, a way of life in syncretic undivided India. Despite the sheer volume of information on the partition available to us today, we are still only learning how to speak hurriedly and sensitively about the event, how to encompass its many facets and countless individual accounts. Traditional means of narration of fail to do justice to the depth of historical trauma and yet it is so necessary to continually express this in words and discuss it and gradually eradicate this notion of the unspeakable. This is what I will do. I speak to people about the past. I listen to them, not for the sake of merely recording an experience or just listening, but to attempt to untangle and attempt to study the memory of traumatic time. So we may never repeat an event like partition. Oral history is not reportage or journalism, but it is the penetration of human memory. It asserts that people's experiences matter. That the small age histories within the larger capital age histories of geographies and landscapes and empires are also important. I have wondered many times about how reliving moments of trauma affect the people that are recalling the story. But the interviewer and the interviewee together go beyond the scope of recollection attempting to untangle the traumatic experience. Many people are unwilling to talk about the event for many years, as though suppression might remove all traces of it. But I think from my experience, no one ever really finds peace and silence, even when it is their choice to remain silent. And so after doing interviews across the world, across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the UK, I do deduce that in crossing the great difficulty of remembering and in giving voice to the experience of 1947, does eventually result in some form of lightness. Because even an inactive crisis can remain a source of lingering trauma. There is a need to talk about what happened because things have not yet settled. There is still so much we don't know about partition and it is not yet an event of the past. This heaviness continues to weigh down. Sometimes only subconsciously, both for those who have lived through it, as well as those who have inherited stories and memories of it. So one of the main questions that I get all the time is how do we begin with these interviews? How do we approach people and how do we start asking questions? The generation that lived through partition obviously has an impact in their mind. It remains still and it is not something to be taken lightly because to remember is still very difficult. So how do we begin to ask the questions? One of the ways in which I began is starting with my family. I come from a family where all four grandparents move from across the border as close as Lahore and as far as Deira Ismail Khan. I started slowly. I started asking about things because things were the way that I found an entryway into the past. To approach someone and say, oh, you lived through partition. It sounds horrible. Can you tell me about it? It's very crass and it still is not sensitive. But to tell someone, oh, you brought this notebook with you or you brought this ring with you or you carried your pencil case from school. How did you know what to carry and who told you that you will never come back? Did you think that you will never come back to your home? Did you think that you will never see these walls again, your room again, your school again, your friends? I think that these questions might seem like they're questions about everyday life. But I want to stress this fact very clearly that partition is not just about August 1947. It is about the time that came before it and the time that came after it. And relationships between Hindus, Muslims and others did not disrupt overnight. So what we are trying to understand through listening, through asking questions, through looking at objects, documents, things like this is to build a form of social ethnography. We want to understand what life was like before it and how this event could happen, an event of this magnitude. So what we are trying to do in our questioning, in our oral history interviews is is to make the person feel as comfortable with you as they can to be able to delve deeper and more vulnerable into their past. And the second thing, of course, is to gather as much information as we can about that time. When I was able to do interviews, I have a very basic questionnaire about where you were born and if they don't know where they were born or when they were born, then approximately what month or what season or maybe how old they were at the time of partition and then you can calculate back. Things were not so easy then in terms of birth certificates or even people's documentation. So there's a little bit of calculation that is always needed. But I think your basic questionnaire should be there. And apart from that, you should try and build on what the person is saying. Another thing that I always employ is doing a bit of research on the area that the person comes from. So if someone knows I'm going to come interview them, I would like to know which is the town of the city of the village they've come from. So I can do a bit of reading about exactly what happened during the partition there, what kind of migration happened, what the culture was like in terms of religion. Was it an agrarian economy? Did it focus more on shops? So my questions can be targeted to those specific things that people might relate to. And the other thing about working with older people is that, and I think somebody of my generation, a millennial, really needs to know this. And I know this question is about listening. So it's very important is that older people really just want someone to listen to them. So if you are in an orderly history interview with someone who is decades older than you, be present. Because it's very important to me to know what they are telling you matters to you. And it should matter to you because there is just so much we don't know about partition. So we are always unearthing something. So if you're a person, if you're genuinely interested, then incredible memories will come out. But I think this is something that we as millennials forget a lot, how to listen and how to let someone talk without interrupting them. The idea of balance is key to engaging with and learning from our participants. We need to maintain a fine balance between speaking and listening, fluidity and structure, empathy for the other and a desire to learn from them. To be reflexive is also to be aware of our position in the research with respect to our participants. Often we engage with people whose cultures and contexts are very different from us. In an interview, these differences manifest in the narratives that are shared and the ways in which they are articulated. Participants build a perception of who we are, our background and experiences. Their interaction with us is based on these perceptions. You may remember the experience of Hagar Salaman, the Israeli researcher and Jerusalem, who interviewed Palestinian women about the maps they embroidered. The narratives shared with Salaman by her Palestinian participants were a response to her identity as an Israeli Jewish woman. It is possible they may have spoken differently to a person from another country. A similar example is that of a former black slave interviewed by two different researchers, one black and one white. In each case, the narratives shared are quite different. You can read these two transcripts here and answer some questions based on your reading. As we immerse ourselves deeper into the world of our participants, their perceptions of us changes. From being someone who represents the other culture or community, we start to be seen as individuals. This shift happens within us too. We build our relationships with them based on this shifting understanding of our similarities and differences. Consider, for example, my engagement with Rani Ben and Meghi Ben. To begin with, we shared a language, Gujarati, and the experience of the earthquake that devastated parts of Gujarat in 2001. These became common grounds on which we built our relationship in the early stages of our interactions. I wanted to understand the notion of displacement that had shaped their lives. I have no experience of being forcibly displaced from my home and they had been repeatedly displaced. First because of the 1972 India-Pakistan war and then by the earthquake in 2001. This was a huge difference between their experiences and mine. Martha Norkunas calls this the difference between knowing and not knowing. It is the difference between what the other knows through their experiences, which we do not. In interacting with each other, we try to bridge this difference. Listening to the other's narratives helps us make sense of this difference in experiences. These narratives act as mediums. They convey experiences, feelings and thoughts that may otherwise be difficult to articulate. In narrating the story of their migration, for instance, Meghi Ben spoke about moving to another place when she got married. Rani Ben shared details about the various stages of her journey of crossing the border. She spoke of the hurdles and difficulties that her community faced along the way and the hopes and fears that accompanied them. She spoke about the worst things that happened. One face was exposed to the wind and one another was left in the air. It was a big shock. Even though she had a beautiful face, I was very happy about it. I was very happy when she met me outside the village. I had such a good attitude and I was moved. I took him to my mother's house and brought him to the balcony. After that, he went to the village. He was informed that he had come from Pakistan. He asked me to help him out. I told him that I had brought him to the balcony. I brought him a trangada. I took him outside at night. I took him to the balcony at night. I took him to the balcony at night. In each narrative, there were various themes which spoke about their experiences of migration and displacement. Their narratives were a record of their lives and their experiences. We see here that reciting their narratives can help participants speak about difficult and complex subjects. And through these narratives, we can better understand their lives and contexts. For a participant, having their narrative heard and recorded is a way of having their version of history recognized. In doing ethnographic interviews, we sometimes play the role of mediators and translators carrying our participants' narratives to the world at large. In this role, listening becomes an act of support and empathy. It emphasizes the human nature of our work. For these reasons, building a meaningful interaction requires a conscious and active effort on our part. We need to pay attention to all of the ways in which we speak and listen to our participants. We need to define what we wish to learn from them and how we may engage and learn. This work begins much before the interview. It is these preparations that form the focus of our next session.