Curating Memories

Abstract This piece shares field notes from an oral history and archiving project conducted during 2009–12 around three mahila samitis: Assam Pradeshik Mahila Samity (Guwahati), Dibrugarh District Mahila Samity (Dibrugarh), and Tezpur District Mahila Samiti (Tezpur). This project (funded by the Sephis Programme, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam and supported by Tezpur University) has digitally scanned and preserved handwritten minutes and proceedings of select early mahila samiti meetings. Simultaneously, audio-visual recordings were made of conversations and interviews with samiti members and associates. The memories of an earlier generation of women both complement and challenge other sources available in print that have figured in this study. This raises questions related to agency, memory, and history and their entanglements in the process of writing about the mahila samiti in the early twenty-first century. Retrieving and recording the mahila samitis’ vision for a ‘revolutionary social change’ has been crucial to understand the richness and diversity of women’s conceptualization of the public sphere anew. This note alerts us to the contingencies that inform the process of creation of an archive—human and technological, academic and logistics without blurring crucial distinctions between voices and visuals, memory and history—where women’s memory transforms the very essence of how we attempt to understand women’s agency, then and now.