What is the thrill in finding a neighbourhood address in an old book and chasing it down? In going on a morning run and chancing upon a majestic construction in your neighbourhood that for some reason no one seems to talk about? In sitting down with the elders in your family and hear their accounts of past events that have been reduced to facts by our history books?

Backyard Histories

If you were born and brought up in an Indian household, chances are that history was thought of as a subject to be studied in school and then forgotten about. Pragmatically speaking though, history is so much more than a subject. Every moment that we’re living in the present, is creating history for tomorrow. When you combine it with scientific explanations such as chaos theory, you can never conclusively know the moment which will ‘create history’.

There’s a very convincing argument to be made that history is written by those who hold the power. The content of our textbooks is decided by education boards under the control of the education ministry and therefore, extremely biased. For instance, the focus of NCERT history textbooks, the most widely used by Indian boards of education, on a colonial understanding of the contributions of rulers like Asoka and Vijaynagara empire, is because of the reform in education that was undertaken by British when they were in India. According to Indian National Congress President C. Sankaran Nair, 1919, Minute of dissent, British government restricted indigenous education:

“Efforts were then made by the Government to confine higher education and secondary education leading to higher education to boys in affluent, circumstances. This again was done not in the interests of sound education but for political reasons.”

Here lies the value of venturing to discover the history in our backyard. Backyard history can be thought of the history that we have immediate access to in our surroundings but which we ignore because it doesn’t seem monumental enough. Every time we chase down an address, look up a backyard structure or listen to the story of an elder, we are deviating from a standardised path to understand where we came from.

Chelsea McGill, co-founder at Immersive Trails, leading the Chinatown
Walk

A few years ago, Tathagata Neogi and Chelsea McGill, co-founders at Immersive Trails, started digging into their backyard history in Kolkata. Trained as an ethno-archeologist and a linguistic anthropologist respectively, they unearthed stories that they later translated into immersive experiences, with their venture Heritage Walk Calcutta in 2017, at a time when the understanding of heritage walks was limited to sightseeing and food tasting with the sprinkles of storytelling. With their immersive experience in the Chinatown of Kolkata, one of their most booked experience, they corrected the perception of Chinese community in Kolkata, developed largely based on incorrect knowledge propagated first by the British and then amplified by locals.

Tathagata & Chelsea, co-founders, winning the silver at Outlook Responsible Tourism Awards 2021 for Best Covid Ready Innovation

In June 2020, in the face of a pandemic, instead of pausing, they accelerated their work by pivoting to Immersive Trails, because they realised the urgency of making history accessible. They believe that one does not need years of training to discover the history in their backyard, and so they expanded their offerings to virtual tours where one can learn about facets of history previously unknown, without being restricted by geographical boundaries. They also carry out documentation and research workshops to equip people, without any age barrier, to research their backyard history. Recognising the importance of seeding critical perspectives towards history at a young age, they also carry out University & School trainings for students of social sciences, wrapping up a hack-a-thon to train students at Exeter University in March 2021. In the face of standardisation of education and a focus on non-questionable facts, rather than critical storytelling, we face the threat of repeating our mistakes, if we’re not already doing so. Each of us can take the initiative to reach out to the history in our backyards and build a subversive understanding of the history that got us here and how we can choose to do things differently in the present.

About 

Immersive Trails is an award-winning academic-run, research-oriented company that provides in-person and virtual experiences of Kolkata and beyond to enable people to experience the city in a new way and connect with diverse local communities. 

Surbhi is a proponent of intersectional work that enables critical thought. She works as a consultant on marketing, business development and digital transformation with arts & cultures organisations. She’s been a Marketing Consultant to Immersive Trails since October 2020.