A collaborative project led by Ajay Dandekar and Sudeshna Guha, which aims at mapping the recollections of Sikkim during the decades of the 1960s and the ‘70s.
The research for this project shall establish a formal archive of ‘great many human-interest stories’ of Sikkim in near contemporary times. Sikkim is an important frontline state of the Indian Union, and local perceptions of its political fortunes allow an understanding of the contemporary dynamics that are internal to the state and those in relation to its external frontiers. The project strives to collect different voices from among the different representative segments of the population, and shall lead to the documentation of oral histories. It anticipates the facilitation of new research into many unknown aspects of Sikkim that bear upon issues, among others, of citizenship, practices of kinship, forms of identity politics, shifting perceptions of authority, ownership, nationhood and transformations of political economies. The ethnographic archive which it shall create would be a unique academic resource with respect to the North East.