History for Peace Regional Conference | 1, 2 and 3 November 2026 | Bulandshahr 2026

People crave narration … That’s the way they learn things. That’s the way human beings organize their human knowledge—fairy tales, myths. All narration—Toni Morrison

At this conference, the central question we wish to explore is What is the relationship between narrative and historical representation and how does this shape the way we understand our past and negotiate the present?

History curricula in schools is generally structured around a nationalist frame, rendering memories, localized spaces, gendered domesticities, subaltern subjectivities, plurality of experiences and the presence of multiple contexts invisible.

Narratives have the power to reverse these erasures. Narratives humanize the past, they restore individual and collective agency, they create empathy—re-centring history on human choices, emotions and moral dilemmas.

However, they are also prone to bias, manipulation and distortion. They can perpetuate the very erasures they are capable of reversing.

While engaging with narratives, historians cross examine them with evidence and understand how they are constructed, embodied and contested across time, space and geographies.

Over two days we will look at various aspects of narratives in history to explore, together, how history education can be transformed from passive engagement to an active practice of civic imagination and critical questioning.

Programme

2.11.2026

9 – 9.15 Opening address: Vidyagyan School

9.15 – 9.25 p.m. Context – Megha Malhotra

9.30 – 10.45 a.m.

Writing the City in Twentieth-century India: Some Reflections on the Early Histories of Calcutta

Kaustabh Mani Sengupta 

Urban history as a genre of historical writing took a distinct shape in India during the early decades of the twentieth century. These early narratives—written by administrator-scholars, amateurs, enthusiasts, family members of local gentry—had certain affinities with what is often termed as ‘local’ or ‘regional’ histories, written in the mode of the gazetteers, handbooks and surveys. In the case of Calcutta, during the early decades of the twentieth century, two distinct modes of retracing the past of the city can be observed. The narratives put forward by H. E. Busteed (Echoes from Old Calcutta), H. E. A. Cotton (Calcutta Old and New), or C R Wilson (Old Fort William, The Early Annals of English in Bengal) charted out the broad contours of European Calcutta. Writing about Calcutta’s past in the early decades of the twentieth century was critical in framing the future of the city. These narratives firmly established the English origin of the city, starting from the landing of the English Company servant, Job Charnock on the banks of river Hooghly on 24 August 1690. While the English narratives viewed the city as part of the triumphalist role played by the Company and the Crown in establishing the empire, the Bengali histories, especially Kolikatar Itibritto (1902) by Prankrishna Datta, sought to stake a claim in the making of the cultural and social milieu of the colonial city. The approach was quite different in these texts. Both these modes of writing will continue throughout the century, with admittedly more critical reading of the English role and more participation from various ‘native’ groups in the making of the modern metropolis. In this presentation, I will look at some of these early narratives of Calcutta’s past to understand the methods and issues, sources and silences, claims and counter-claims involved in writing the city.

Kaustubh Mani Sengupta teaches in the Department of History, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. His research focuses on urban history, early colonial state in India, history of infrastructure, spatial history, and public history. He is the author of Carving Calcutta: Space, Economy, and Law in Eighteenth-century Bengal (Orient Blackswan, 2026). He is the co-editor of Rethinking the Local in Indian History: Perspectives from Southern Bengal (Routledge, 2021), Itihaser Bitarka, Bitarker Itihas: Oteeter Bharat O Bartaman Gabeshona (Ananda Publishers, 2021), and The Long 2020: Reflections of Epidemiological Times (Springer, 2024). He co-authored Kheladhulo (2024) as part of the ‘Itihase Hatekhori’ series. Written for general readers, his book on various historical facets of Calcutta is Kolikatha (Khosra Khata, 2025).

10.45 – 11.15 a.m.

Break

11.30 a.m. – 12.30 p.m.

Q & A with Romila Thapar on her talk Who Write History and Why which will be sent to all participants prior to the start of the conference.

12.30 – 1.30 p.m.

Lunch

1.30 – 2.45 p.m.

Memory, History, and Narratives

Divya Kannan

History and memory have a contentious relationship with each other. On the one hand, History is considered a means of systematically studying and interpreting the past, while on the other hand, memory has been perceived as almost a 'pure' source of historical information and meaning-making. However, memory is not a stable source devoid of context and politics and historians have to account for varied individual and collective memories in their narrative re-interpretations. In the South Asian context, memory is increasingly seen as filling gaps left by professional historians and has led to popular views and suspicions towards the discipline of History itself. While collective memory can sustain knowledge traditions and link individuals to the communities to which they belong, what we choose to remember or forget, when and why, continue to remain important questions if we are to make sense of the present. This presentation will provide a few glimpses into these debates and asks what role memory plays in shaping our lives in the contemporary moment.

Divya Kannan is Associate Professor, Department of History and Archaeology, Shiv Nadar University Delhi-NCR. Her research interests include histories of empire, childhood, education, gender, and public history. She is the author of the monograph Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial Kerala ( Cambridge University Press, 2024), apart from several articles. Currently, she is also the Principal Investigator of the SNF Inter Institutional Collaborative project between Shiv Nadar University, Vidyagyan Bulandshahr and Shiv Nadar School Noida on ‘Past as Present: Approaches to History, Archaeology and Pedagogy’. 

3 – 5.30 p.m.

Parrallel Workshops

For Teachers:

·      Two Songs and the Idea of a Nation

 Sunita Biswas

Songs as national symbols are much more than ceremonial renditions of patriotism. They may appear timeless and self-evident yet they have histories. They emerge from particular political moments, carry the aspirations and anxieties of their time and acquire new meanings as circumstances change. This workshop explores the historical narratives embedded in two songs that define our nation. It asks participants to look beyond their ceremonial familiarity and investigate the ideas of nationhood, identity and belonging that shaped their emergence and subsequent interpretation.

What kind of nation did the lyrics imagine? Whose experiences and aspirations found expression in them? How were they understood during the freedom struggle and what happened to those meanings after Independence? How did a revolutionary protest song and a conventional hymn transform into formalized state symbols? How did political circumstances, public memory and changing ideas of citizenship shape the ways in which they came to be used and understood?

These questions have acquired particular urgency today. At a time when nationalism and patriotism are increasingly contested, familiar national symbols have become sites of debate over belonging, loyalty, dissent and what it means to be a citizen. They can evoke pride and belonging, but also disagreement, discomfort and demands for conformity. The workshop will therefore move between history and the present, examining not only how national symbols acquire meaning but also how that meaning can be invoked, contested and remade. It will also consider the tensions between a shared national identity and the many different histories, memories and experiences that make up the nation. 

Sunita Biswas taught history in school for over 25 years,  encouraging students to look beyond the textbook, question received narratives and develop a curious, critical engagement with the past. Now a Senior Programme Officer at History for Peace, she continues to explore ways to make history engaging, more questioning and, perhaps most importantly, a force for empathy, dialogue and peace.

·      Turning the Mirror: reflecting on ourselves as teachers

Madhura Lohokare

School teachers’ multiple responsibilities of everyday teaching and administrative work barely gives them any opportunity to pause and reflect on their pedagogical practices and their role as teachers. This workshop will attempt to do precisely that: give us a moment to pause, reflect, and share assumptions and beliefs that we carry into the classroom not just as a teacher, but also as an individual who is located in a certain class, caste and gendered position. This has important consequences for what we teach and how we teach. Our classrooms are not merely composed of walls, benches, black/ white boards, students and teachers: they are social spaces, where students and teachers bring their social journeys and vulnerabilities into the room. As teachers we hold certain narratives about who is a ‘good’ student, who is a ‘weak’ student as well as what qualities make a ‘good’ teacher. We shall turn the mirror on to ourselves in this workshop and through some guided writing exercises/ group work attempt to examine these narratives in a spirit of reflexivity, in the hope that we can make our classrooms spaces of affirmation and safety for the students and teachers. 

Madhura Lohokare directs the Centre for Writing Studies at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana. Trained in anthropology and now located in writing pedagogy, they are interested in questions of care in the classroom and developing methodologies for researching academic reading and writing. They have conducted writing workshops for postgraduate and doctoral students across several public institutions in India, including JNU, Central University of Hyderabad, IIT Mumbai, Savitribai Phule Pune University and IIT Delhi.

For Students

Inequality and vulnerability - the gender lens

Neha Pradhan

As adolescents learn to explore and express their own identity, gender—as a concept and a lived reality—becomes a critical and a more acknowledged part of every aspect of their lives. Every thought, emotion, choice and action is influenced by how they see themselves and how the world sees them.  Gender roles and stereotypes also put them more at risk of abuse and violence at home, online, in their peer group and in the larger world. This interactive and experiential workshop aims to create a safe space for critical conversations on gender as a part of our identity and the impact of patriarchy on this identity and our lives. It hopes to build collective responsibility toward creating a world that is safe, respectful and accepting of everyone and it emphasizes the need for change in each individual, each classroom, each community. 

The workshop will be led by Neha Pradhan Arora, Co-founder and Executive Director of Mudita Foundation.  Mudita Foundation is an organisation committed to creating a world where each individual is living upto their full potential without the fear of abuse and exploitation. Since their inception, they have worked with over 16000 children and adults and close to 175 organisations through awareness and capacity-building programmes focused on tackling and preventing all forms of abuse, violence and exploitation impacting children, young adults and women.

A social worker from Tata Institute of Social Sciences and a teacher, Neha has worked on issues related to social justice, education, gender and adolescent empowerment with organisations and schools across the country, for over 20 years towards building safe, inclusive, and resilient communities.  In the last few years she has been leading the organisation's work and regularly conducts awareness and capacity-building programmes with schools, community-based organisations and corporates on issues related to gender, child protection, risks to youth, sexual harassment at the workplace.

·      Extreme Weathers and the Urban Poor in India

Anwesha Sengupta, Debarati Bagchi

This workshop aims to understand climate crisis in contemporary urban spaces. It focuses specifically on the consequences of extreme weather for the people on the street – the gig workers, the construction workers, the transport workers, the roadside fruit-sellers and so on. How do summer, monsoon and winter impact their lives and livelihood? We will explore these questions by reading/listening to some of the first-person narratives. We will also explore the connections of environmental crisis with the ideas of urban development. How contemporary are such ideas? Were the lives of the poorer people better in the past? By raising such concerns, the facilitators will interrogate the climate memories of the people living and working on the streets. They will also historicize the connections between development and climate crisis.  Finally, through creative group activities, the students will try to imagine a city that was/will be more liveable for the urban poor.

Anwesha Sengupta teaches history at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata. Her areas of interest include partition, decolonization, popular movement, gender, urban history, and public history. She has written and co-edited a series of alternative history books in Bengali for middle school children.

Debarati Bagchi is a Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director at the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, Delhi. Debarati’s PhD dissertation (Delhi University) titled ‘Many Spaces of Sylhet: Making of a Regional Identity’ explored the agrarian and cultural histories of frontiers and borderlands in colonial Northeast India. Post-PhD, Debarati’s area of research shifted towards the history and sociology of education. She has completed two postdoctoral projects, one on the connection between language and mass education and the other on education and urban transformation. Currently, she is part of the focus area Education and Learning at MWF Delhi. She works in the field of child pedagogy, public history and the history of production and regulation of textbooks in India. She has written and co-edited a series of alternative history books in Bengali for middle school children.

3.11.2026

9.30 – 10.45 a.m.

Illustrating the Revolutionaries: Bhagat Singh and Azad in Amar Chitra Katha

Aparna Vaidik

This talk explores the life narratives of revolutionaries through the children’s comic book series Amar Chitra Katha. The particular series focussing on the revolutionaries was produced in the 1970s. Available in multiple languages, these comics other than cinema, provided one of the most popular source of information about the revolutionaries. It was a powerful medium that held a great deal of appeal for children with its colourful illustrations, dialogues, multiplicity of characters and voices. Read and consumed in the intimacy of homes and schools, Amar Chitra Katha’s stories left an indelible imprint on the imagination of an entire generation of children. Through a survey of the illustrations of the books on Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad, the talk asks: what kind of narrative regarding the revolutionaries did the comic books weave? What did it include and leave out? Why were they produced in the 1970s and not before? Presumed to be apolitical, what is the politics of children’s stories? And finally, in what way did they constitute the popular historical consciousness?

Aparna Vaidik teaches History at Ashoka University. Educated at St. Stephen’s College, Cambridge University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, she has previously taught at Georgetown University, Washington DC and University of Delhi. She has authored Imperial Andamans (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Waiting for Swaraj (CUP, 2022), Revolutionaries on Trial (Aleph 2024), and a creative non-fiction My Son's Inheritance (Aleph 2020). She is also a recipient of research grants from the British Academy, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Indian Council for Historical Research and Charles Wallace India Trust. She has been actively involved in public pedagogy and is President Trustee of a charitable trust that houses a community library with 5000+ members. She lives in Delhi and is a parent of two rambunctious home schoolers.

10.45 – 11.15 a.m.

Break

11.30 a.m. 12.45 p.m.

“किनकी कहानियां इतिहास बनती हैं?”

Bhanwar Meghvanshi

(राजा-महाराजाओं से आगे,इतिहास की किताब के बाहर : विस्मृत समुदायों के संघर्षों और साधारण लोगों की मेहनत से बनने वाले इतिहास को समझना)

इतिहास केवल राजाओं,युद्धों और सत्ता के फैसलों की कहानी नहीं है। इसके पन्नों के बाहर भी करोड़ों साधारण लोगों ने अपने श्रम,संघर्ष और प्रतिरोध से समाज को बनाया है।

दलित,आदिवासी,घुमंतू,स्त्रियाँ और हाशिये के समुदायों की स्मृतियाँ इतिहास की अधूरी तस्वीर को पूरा करती हैं।जरूरत है कि हम इतिहास को सत्ता की नजर से नहीं,बल्कि उन लोगों की आँखों से भी देखें जिनकी आवाजें दबा दी गईं।

यह संवाद इसी सवाल की पड़ताल है कि आखिर किनकी कहानियाँ इतिहास बनती हैं और किनकी कहानियाँ इतिहास से गायब कर दी जाती हैं?

Bhanwar Meghwanshi is an award-winning writer, journalist and social activist. Born in a weaver’s family in Sidiyas village in Rajasthan.

As a teenager, Bhanwar Meghwanshi became a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which he later quit and became associated with grassroots organisations working for social and economic justice. This led him to play an active role in student politics and then into full-time work at the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan for 13 years.

Meghwanshi was once a school teacher. He was also formerly the founder and editor of Diamond India, a monthly journal that covered issues from grassroots perspectives. He is the founder of the Dalit Adivasi and Nomadic Adhikar Abhiyan, Rajasthan (Dagar). 

His recent book, I Could Not be Hindu: The Story of a Dalit in the RSS has caught the attention of people from all over the world. He runs the award-winning news website, Shunyakal. These days, he has an active association with the People’s Union for Civil Liberties. He is recipient of the Bhauruka Charitable Trust Award, Sarojini Naidu Award, and Ambedkar International Award.

12.45 – 1.45 p.m.

Lunch

2 – 4.30 p.m.

Workshops:

For Teachers:

·      Two Songs and the Idea of a Nation

  Sunita Biswas

·      Turning the Mirror: reflecting on ourselves as teachers

    Madhura Lohokare

For Students

·      Inequality and vulnerability - the gender lens

Neha Pradhan

·      Extreme Weathers and the Urban Poor in India

Anwesha Sengupta, Debarati Bagchi, Kaustabh Mani Sengupta

4. 30 p.m.

Closing