Workshop - Training Course on Local History

Aim

From left to right : Jean-Pierre Muller ; K. N. Panikkar ; Y. Subbarayalu ; Arunan

The aim of the workshop is to train students, teachers and young writers from various districts of Tamil Nadu to engage with the exercise of reconstructing local histories. The Workshop will not only introduce the scientific aspects of such an engagement with available expertise in the field, but would also provide the participants with the most fundamental tools and techniques in an interdisciplinary manner.

Method

The focus of the Workshop would be to enable every participant to attempt reconstruction of local histories. Using lectures and demonstrations, the invited experts would guide the participants in an interactive manner in the appropriate techniques required for a meaningful engagement. The techniques that the experts would train the participants in, would cover the fields of Archeology, Epigraphy, Economic and Social History, Cultural Studies and Literature. While lecture demonstrations would constitute the programme of the Workshop, exposure to field work on the final day will provide the participants with a practical experience that would inspire them to undertake similar exercises in the near future. Designing of specific local history projects by the participants would ensure that the Workshop succeeds in attaining certain practical goals and the interaction, begun at the Workshop, would thus continue into the future.

Process

The participants are culturally sensitive, young writers whose prior knowledge would be taken as an advantage in conducting the Workshop. For example, if they have oral narratives at their disposal, means and methods to scientifically engage with such primary sources would be discussed. Aspects of social and economic power relations, caste and religion, knowledge and practices are often found to be lacking in untrained exercises, for most of them tend to be narrated as stories, whereas the craft of the historian requires that such narratives be subjected to historical scrutiny, for which most lack the techniques. It is this space that the Workshop would attempt to fill in, using experienced professionals, who themselves have been engaged in the academic practice of writing history.

Programme

Consult detailed session plan

Organisers

French Institute of Pondicherry and Tamil Nadu Progressive Writers Association

Contact

• Prof. Y. Subbarayulu
• Kannan M.
• Senthil Babu
• S. Tamilselvan
• S. Ramachandran, Progressive Writers Association, Pondicherry