Show trains spotlight on the ordinary lives that make up history

In April 1980, Sumati Morarjee, chairperson of the Scindia Steam Navigation Company and known as the first lady of Indian shipping, got a letter from the Prime Minister's House in New Delhi. "Thank you for your letter, your prayers, the prasad and the mangoes," wrote Indira Gandhi. Look closely at the typewritten black words and you will find a last-minute adjective scribbled in blue pen: "delicious."

"Business and political relationships were always important…but somewhere along the way, they became personal and intimate," reads the caption underneath the correspondence, summing up the essence of In the Telling, the third exhibition by The Citizens' Archive of India.

Drawing from over 700 hours of interviews and more than 6,500 digitised objects gathered across India in 17 languages, the four-day exhibition by this decade-old digital oral history project puts the spotlight on the small human stories that make up the larger record.

"We wanted to record the stories of people who've lived through India before Independence and after, because we have one generation now that can still tell us," says Malvika Bhatia, director of CAI, during a walkthrough of the show. "Ten years ago, it was still easier to interview them. Now it's becoming very, very difficult."

Political upheavals appear not as dates and events but as things that happened to people as they tried to live ordinary lives. One woman recalls sleeping through the Assam agitation with her children fully dressed — shoes, socks, a torch and water kept nearby — in case they had to flee at night. Another, Rama Khandwala, remembered her English-medium school in Burma transforming overnight into a Japanese one during World War II. As a teenager with the Indian National Army, she broke her leg near the frontlines and cried from homesickness. "Netaji himself came to my bed," she recalled. "He said, 'We don't want to look back, we want to move forward.'"

Unlike conventional archives built around governments or institutions, CAI focuses on oral history and material memory — recorded interviews alongside personal objects such as letters, photographs, diaries, passports and memorabilia. The archive is entirely digital: contributors retain the physical objects while CAI digitises them. Which is why at the showcase are stories that carry no obvious historical weight yet offer glimpses into another time. First saris marked with giant jalebis. Newly married couples mailing photographs across continents so they could see how they'd aged. A man who skipped college to work in a tractor factory and carefully preserved his commendation letters from Keshub Mahindra.

One of the exhibition's most affecting interviews belongs to Dr Armida Fernandes, the pioneering neonatal specialist recently awarded the Padma Shri, who remembers her father as "a dreamer and a writer" who followed the freedom movement through poetry. Her mother kept the house going across seven children on a professional salary, somehow making it seem effortless. "We never wanted for anything. It was an open house."

Bhatia says interviews rarely begin smoothly. Elderly participants worry they will forget dates or facts. She disarms them with a simple question: "What's your father's name? What did he do?" Then, she says, "the nervousness vanishes. Chances are, they haven't spoken about their parents in years. Their eyes light up."

In the final room, visitors are handed an old Mughal-e-Azam cinema ticket — an invitation to watch a short film about the archive. On emerging, a visitor tells Bhatia: "The stories appear very different at first. But you have managed to show how they are connected."