This was my first actual week of research, after returning from a holiday and recovering from illness, so despite its slow-moving nature, it felt momentous. I spent most days cold calling and emailing folks and then further calling contacts that I obtained through them, in hopes of securing interviews. As someone prone to a certain degree of inertia, this was actually rather taxing. Regardless, it has proved fruitful. At this present moment, I have secured a few really crucial interviews and am in the process of securing a few more. A large number of people are yet to get back but I am confident of getting in touch with them over the next month. One person I managed to reach out to was Professor Surinder Jodhka of Jawaharlal Nehru University, and I will be travelling to New Delhi to interview him this coming Tuesday! I also have three interviews coming up before this week ends.
This first week has taught me a few crucial things. Because of the nature of my project and my ability to access particular bodies of knowledge, I cannot constrain my study to the region of Doaba (my home district) alone and will have to broaden it to all of Punjab. While that was my original idea, I had slowly begun to whittle it down to the local level. This first week has shown me that broader is better, and in general, flexibility beats rigidity. It beats rigidity because I am asking folks for a favour when I ask for an interview, and that comes with its own set of challenges in terms of being taken seriously, cancellations and so on. Also, perhaps due to negative experiences in the past, a lot of folks have seemed resistant to the interview format and have expressed their reservations about being misrepresented in some way. As this is an oral history project and it is my foremost duty to make the interviewee feel fully comfortable, I have spent a good amount of time trying to assuage people’s fears, and I am sure that I will have to do much more of that as the work goes on.
In all, I am learning to enjoy the process. It is different from my usual fare!
P.s: don’t really have pictures to share as there was no field work this week. I will have plenty for the next post though!