Shahana Chakraborty traces a methodological history of the oral history project ‘Neighbourhood Diaries’ and its implications on the communal wellbeing and memory of Chittaranjan Park residents.
The echoes of a faraway land, once their home, nudged a group of Bengalis living in Delhi to rebuild and relive their common identity. Bound by a feeling of being uprooted and a deep longing for a new beginning, they fought for a piece of land they could call their own. The wounds of the Partition were still fresh in the hearts and minds of these people who had been forced to leave their homeland. The only way they could reconcile with their cruel fate was by holding onto continuity amidst the forced change.
Shahana Chakraborty, And They Lived: Early Years of CR Park, 2022
In the aftermath of The Partition of India in 1947 and the resulting forced mass exodus on an unprecedented scale, many post-partition neighbourhoods were brought into being in the Indian subcontinent. Similarly, Chittaranjan Park (CR Park) – a post-partition resettlement neighbourhood in South Delhi, earlier known by the name of East Pakistan Displaced Persons Colony (EPDP) – was born in the 1960s. A passionate and spirited group of migrant Bengalis transformed a barren land amongst wilderness allotted to them into a habitable and thriving locality.
The external struggle of building home in an unwelcoming, unfriendly terrain was coupled with an internal one. While they worked hard to build a new place of living for themselves, a part of them continued to dwell in the land they have been long separated from, that nurtured them, saw them toddle away in the innocence of infancy. And one fine day, they learnt that they no longer belonged there. So, CR Park was born out of these nostalgic roots, painful memories, and a passion for re-creation.
Healing does not always manifest in clinical, diagnostic terms – in the case of the residents of CR Park, healing meant being seen, listened to, and remembered. Responding to this need for a shift from repression to celebration, the oral history project Neighbourhood Diaries was launched in 2016 by the sociocultural organisation Shapno Ekhon. As the project lead, I will share a methodological review of the project and discuss resonances within understandings of non-clinical wellbeing in communities.
Community-led Oral Histories as Therapeutic Practice
The numerous tales of trauma, resilience and courage of the original allotees, who had played a crucial role in building the neighbourhood were trying to find a voice. The rich tapestry of their personal histories would be lost forever if not told, preserved and passed on.
At Shapno Ekhon, we were working with children and adolescents, fostering a meaningful connection with the heritage Delhi through theme-based walks and projects, emphasizing on them taking a lead and reclaiming knowledge. As we advanced on this journey, we realized that we were missing a very crucial part of our history – our local heritage.
CR Park had been a home to many of us who were members of Shapno Ekhon. We were either born and raised here or had migrated to it from other cities and towns.
What happens to the mental landscape of migrants during such a geographical shift has been studied clinically. “Asylum seekers and displaced persons worldwide report high rates of pre-migration trauma’ (Robjant et al. 2009) and display high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and anxiety” (Chatterjee et al. 2020). There is a gaping lack of mental health services that specifically support displaced people in India, and arguably none that understand the intergenerational feeling of unbelonging. There is a need for an active, empathetic who would be able to grasp the depth of grief and loneliness that forced immigrants battle with.
“Medical educations and the practice of medicine often neglect empathy in favour of biomedical approaches to disease and injury” (Garden 2007). The role of oral histories can be pertinent in addressing these gaps in the biomedical model. Oral history recording of sociocultural and geographical memory of people who have been displaced becomes one of the approaches through which this can be achieved. Neighbourhood Diaries takes this to the level of community, where stories are recorded for and through residents of CR Park. The model then ceases to be just documentation, and becomes a process of healing in itself – a model that is archival yet living – and the positive impact on the wellness of the residents can be felt palpably through the reconciliation with their histories.
While it is vital to record narratives of migration and displacement, the focus, from the very beginning, had been on capturing diverse and multi-hued narratives. On one hand doctors, artists, university professors, journalists were being interviewed that represented a middle-class lens. On the other hand, we listened to and recorded marginalised and counter narratives, such as domestic workers and traders who built the famous CR Park markets.
Through interviews, exhibitions, storytelling, theatre, and visual artwork, Neighbourhood Diaries is a multivocal documentation of lived experience. This model can become pivotal in community health settings to narrativize emotional histories and action appropriate and contextualised trauma-informed care.
Intergenerational Engagement as Psychosocial Intervention
In the initial phase of the project which started in 2017, 15 children from the local community of CR Park and its satellite areas embarked on a journey of collecting narratives and memories of residents of CR Park. A beautiful symphony played as the young people began to interview the older generation of residents. They had gripping stories to tell about their displacement and forced migration from Bangladesh and how they built a new neighbourhood for themselves from scratch.
89-year-old Dr Krishna Sengupta, a well-known homeopathy practitioner, moved to CR Park in 1972 from Sylhet, a city in erstwhile East Pakistan. During an interview, she shared with the children:
“Times were uncertain. At the age of 16 years, I had to flee Sylhet as there had been a warrant issued against my father. Our family lived in opulence. We had to let go of it all. Ek kapore badir theke beriye aasha (left home with nothing more than what I was wearing).”
She expressed the sense of terror experienced by the family while crossing the border:
We were forced to leave behind gold and other items of jewellery lest we be searched at the border. I was a young adolescent of 16 and Baba did not want to take a risk. We fearfully sat huddled in our car, anticipating the worst. My father firmly told the guards at the check post to keep their hands off us as we were not carrying anything. We were spared.
Such an intimate, emotional exchange brought the two generations closer as the children became the empathetic listener that the residents could not find in clinics. Theirs was unlike a conventional interview-interviewee relationship as here was a younger generation trying to trace its own roots through the historical capital of the interviewees. Neighbourhood Diaries was not only fostering a sense of belonging in CR Park, but also making the older generations feel less isolated. In the context of health, this presents itself as a potent model of intentionally connecting generations to reduce ageism and loneliness, and contextualise illness within broader life narratives. The celebration and collective mourning of people’s history and their shared pride in it was also one of the ways that stimulated the over-all mental well-being of members of a community.
Participatory Archives and Interdisciplinary Approaches
Studies conducted in the field of museums and health suggest that “museum and art gallery encounters can help with a range of health issues, enhance wellbeing, and build social capital and resilience” (Chatterjee 2016). The first phase had children curate a one-day Neighbourhood Museum at Chittaranjan Memorial Society, a socio-cultural institution in CR Park, in August 2017. The exhibition was open to all people from the community of CR Park where they could witness and celebrate a slice of their own history. The exhibits included maps, diaries and items of personal use, utensils, photographs etc. Some of which were around 100 years old.
In 2018, Neighbourhood Diaries launched a series of pop-up museums ‘CR Park Story: A Retelling’. The monthly pop-up museum involves an exhibition of archival photographs and adda (informal conversation) – a non-hierarchical, non-clinical space where residents can verbalise memories of loss, grief, unfamiliarity and excitement. Some of the addas have been themed around the history of healthcare in CR Park, women’s participation in the building of the neighbourhood, and traditions of biodiversity.
The anecdotal history of the neighbourhood collected through interviews and group discussions conducted with over 80 respondents found their way into a book called And They Lived: Early Years of CR Park. We started a Facebook page and a blog for the community to engage with and contribute their stories and articles. This became the seed for an anthology called Living the Memories: Chronicles of Chittaranjan Park, published in 2024. Little fragments, in the form of writings and illustrations, have been stitched together to create a rich fabric of CR Park, the erstwhile EPDP colony.
We launched a lecture series in 2020 to explore interdisciplinary perspectives on various aspects of the development of neighbourhoods in Delhi. Speakers included conservationists Pradip Krishen and Vijay Dhasmana, historians Swapna Liddle and Narayani Gupta, author William Dalrymple, filmmaker Sohail Hashmi, and academic Samik Bandopadhyay.
There are often strong memories and emotions associated with a place where a person grew up and lived. Images, scents, sounds and flavours leave impressions on the emotional-mental landscape of a person. A neighbourhood is perhaps one of the first places in the life of an individual where they start forming a personal-social identity. A neighbourhood usually cradles the formative years of a human being and could be considered a place for informal sociocultural schooling. A neighbourhood presents the first lens to look at our surroundings and interpret them. A neighbourhood is complex, and thus experiences are complex and need to be studied with an interdisciplinary lens, which is why understandings of health when supporting such residents necessitates using medical humanities lenses.
Conclusion
Health and trauma are not purely biological but also cultural, historical and geographical, as clearly shown in CR Park. Thus, biomedical models must be scaffolded and informed by place-based research into community health, collaborating with ecologists, historians, and archivists.
There are neighbourhoods that an individual may migrate to and adopt. There too exists an inevitable yearning to know the unknown and to belong. The fulfilment of this need may thus create a greater sense of wellbeing, as well as belonging to the immediate environment. For people participating in the unravelling of this history, there would be increased awareness and appreciation of each other, as well as the danger of revealing painful histories. Their interactions may become models for an enhanced sense of psychosocial relationality.
Neighbourhood Diaries provides a few such models of storying neighbourhoods to support community wellbeing that have nourished the dwellers of CR Park. While every neighbourhood may need its own model, this project has demonstrated clear evidence of the interdisciplinary value of such oral history projects.
About the author
Shahana Chakravarty (she/her) is a writer, theatre artist, heritage educator and disability rights professional with Action for Ability Development and Inclusion (AADI), which is an organisation working to facilitate enabling environments for people with disability further marginalised by poverty and gender inequalities. She is a member of the executive committee of Shapno Ekhon, a sociocultural organisation, within which she leads Neighbourhood Diaries, a heritage education project focussing on the history of Chittaranjan Park.
References
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Majumdar, Malabika, ed. 2024. Living the Memories: Chronicles of Chittaranjan Park. Shapno Ekhon.
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