The goal of the social project Be:long is to make it easier for students from underserved backgrounds to learn about and connect with the lived histories and community memories of post-colonial Indian heritage. The project's goals are to use new, interactive models to make history feel lived, personal, and open to everyone. Be:long combines oral history, storytelling, reading-based interaction, and place-based learning to build a strong base for preserving history and building empathy.
Putting the initiative into motion is broken down into the following main, doable parts:
Be:lieve (Ethnography): A podcast series devoted to the study of oral history and its preservation and dissemination in methods that pique the interest of a wider audience. The series looks at how to interview family members and community elders in a responsible way, deal with sensitive historical events, and turn personal stories into public educational tools.
Be:gin (Under the Banyan Tree Stories): A unique collection of age-appropriate children's stories, such as Nani's Notes on Nineteen Forty-Seven and Eating in the East, Walking to the West. Through relatable, fictional conversations between a grandpa and a grandson, these stories make the historical events of the 1947 Partition and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, and regional displacement less mysterious. This will allow young readers to connect contemporary realities with direct witness testimonies. They are then given directly to partner NGOs to help build empathy in young people.
Be:cause Reading Circle: A forum where participants can lead discussions using the storybooks created for the project. Students share personal histories about past generations and work in small groups to discuss and reflect on the overarching themes of migration, memory, family history, and belonging.
Be:Long History Walk: Students will have the opportunity to discover North Calcutta's neighborhoods, buildings, streets, and communal spaces linked to migration and post-colonial urban history on an expert-led historical exploration. The tour shows how history is interwoven in architecture and ordinary public geographies, allowing participants to map the topics from the books to the city.