{"id":162638,"date":"2024-10-27T18:04:09","date_gmt":"2024-10-27T18:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/27\/the-oman-collection-unveiling-indian-diaspora-tales\/"},"modified":"2024-10-27T18:04:09","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T18:04:09","slug":"the-oman-collection-unveiling-indian-diaspora-tales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/27\/the-oman-collection-unveiling-indian-diaspora-tales\/","title":{"rendered":"The Oman Collection: Unveiling Indian diaspora tales"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Our primary school was housed in a single room where children of different age groups were taught the same subject in Gujarati,” recalls Asha Khimji in one of the tapes that National Archives of India<\/a> is processing as part of its oral history project<\/a> to chronicle the lives of diaspora. ‘The Oman Collection<\/a>‘ is the first attempt by India to record how Indians travelled for trade, settled abroad and influenced the culture of the countries they adopted. <\/p>\n

The exercise began in May this year in an attempt to digitise records<\/a> dating back to the 19th century when traders from Kutch started travelling to Muscat<\/a> through a short sea route and then an arduous land journey. The project became bigger in scale as 32 diaspora families came forward to tell details. Khimji, an octogenarian settled in Muscat, tells a tale passed down by her grandmother to her mother on how the Indian community had to travel for five days back home to find brides and also speaks about Indian traders earning a place in society, with temples existing close to mosques.<\/p>\n

Speaking to ET, NAI director general Arun Singhal said: “About 32 prominent Indian families came forward to share their stories and old documents like passports, old account books, citations, personal correspondence, telegrams, trade invoices, photographs of their grandparents and several official records. Our team travelled to Muscat and recorded interviews as part of the oral history project. The documents were scanned and have been digitally acquired by us with their consent.” Over 7,000 documents in English, Arabic, Gujarati and Hindi from the private collections of the 32 families were scanned and digitised. The oldest record dates to 1838.<\/p>\n

Kalpana Shukla, a consultant who recorded several interviews, says the interviews give a peek into the way families adopted the local culture and won the trust of locals. “Though traders travelled in the 19th century, but this increased during the two world wars. Families told us how their parents recalled falling onto bad times between 1919 and 1939 and then travelling to Oman to find avenues of livelihood. There are also stories on how locals would just leave bags of coins with Indian traders and take them back without counting,” said Shukla.<\/p><\/div>\n


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“Our primary school was housed in a single room where children of different age groups were taught the same subject in Gujarati,” recalls Asha Khimji in one of the tapes that National Archives of India is processing as part of its oral history project to chronicle the lives of diaspora. ‘The Oman Collection‘ is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":162639,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/img.etimg.com\/photo\/msid-114662623,imgsize-133688.cms","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[602],"tags":[1952,22385,126485,1025,14344,126484,50548,58478,32812,126482,126483,30404,6969],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162638"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162638"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":162640,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162638\/revisions\/162640"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}