A wedding card, a tea set and two lives
My grandmother’s wedding card, the tea set she brought from a refugee home in Bikaner, and her mid-century Bengal Potteries plates together map her movement from Kulachi to Rajasthan.
A crowdsourced digital repository of material culture of the Indian subcontinent, tracing family history and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and objects of antiquity
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Pammi Mandhwani’s dabbi
My paternal was about thirteen (we can only estimate) when her sister and she got married to two brothers and moved away from Sukkar for the very first time. This brass dabbi was one of the many objects she and her sister brought along to their marital house in Larkana.
The photo archive of Vishwa Nath Vij
A few years ago, my aunt had given me a set of photos in a ziplock bag – small, black-and-white prints, some gently curling at the corners, the ink on their backs now faint with time. At first, I enjoyed them as a playful gaze into my grandfather’s life across the world, but I’ve since begun to consider them as a testimony about time, reading them as I would a biography. Then, in 2023, after my grandfather’s death, I came to inherit two of the many cameras through which he once saw the world.
From My Grandmother’s Hands – a recipe book from 1986
A cookbook that dates back to the year 1986 is filled with my maternal grandmother’s handwritten recipes. This diary was her companion throughout her life, but after she died in 2023, it became dearer to my mother. Now, in the age of ordering in and eating out, it has found new relevance amongst my mother and her sisters
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