Ask an elder what is normal today that simply did not exist when they were your age. Almost every elder will name at least three things at once, and each one has come from somewhere.
How to do the interview properly:
- Choose one person over sixty — a grandparent, a neighbour, a shopkeeper, a teacher who has retired.
- Fix a time when they are free, and take a notebook and a pen. Tell them why you have come.
- Ask these questions, one at a time, and let them talk: “What did you eat as a child that we do not eat now?” · “What do we eat now that you had never even heard of?” · “Which songs did you sing at weddings?” · “What is done at festivals now that was not done then?” · “When did the first television, telephone, gas stove or scooter come to your street?”
- Write down their exact words wherever you can, not your own summary of them.
- At the end ask, “Where do you think it came from?” — and then find out for yourself as well.
- Write the person's name and age at the top of the page.
Sample answer
Interview with my grandmother, Kamla Devi, age 72.
She told me that when she was a girl there were no noodles, no momos, no pizza and no birthday cake in their village. Birthdays were not celebrated with a cake and candles at all — the mother made kheer or halwa and the child touched the elders' feet. The cake and the ‘Happy Birthday’ song came much later, from Europe and America, first to the cities and then to the villages, through films and television.
She also said that tea was not drunk every day in her childhood. It was made only when a guest came. Now everybody drinks it two or three times a day. She said the change came when tea began to be sold in packets and advertised everywhere.
The third thing she mentioned was the gas stove. She cooked on a chulha with wood and cow-dung cakes, and her eyes stung with smoke every day. The gas cylinder came to their house when she was already a mother.
| What the elder may name | Where it came from |
|---|---|
| Noodles, chowmein, momos | China, Tibet and Nepal — they came to Indian towns through hill towns and street carts |
| Pizza, burger, cake, cold drinks | Europe and America, through cities, films and television |
| Birthday cake and the ‘Happy Birthday’ song | A European and American custom; earlier Indian birthdays meant sweets and elders' blessings |
| Tea drunk several times a day | The plant grows in Assam, but the daily habit spread across India only in the last hundred years |
| Ready-made clothes, jeans, school shoes | Earlier almost everything was stitched by the local tailor |
| Plastic buckets, mugs and bottles | They replaced brass, copper and earthen pots within one lifetime |
| Television, mobile phone, film songs at weddings | Machines from abroad; the wedding songs that grandmothers sang are now rarely heard |
| Pav bhaji, idli, dhokla eaten far from where they began | These travelled within India, from one state to another |