Study title

India, Kenya

Individual

Oral history interviews (India and Kenya)In south India, we gathered oral histories in two villages of one district. The villages were visited every day for a period of seven months (October 2017 to April 2018). In Kenya, oral histories were collected in Machakos county (from November 2018 to February 2019). We conducted multiple detailed open-ended interviews with each participant. The participants were selected purposefully to include multiple castes and agrarian backgrounds, while achieving gender balance.All interviews were audio recorded. The interviews were conducted in Tamil (India) and Kikamba (Kenya), and the audio recordings were translated into English. The interviews were time-intensive. Many of the interviews lasted more than two hours. They were geared towards grasping people’s perceptions of long-term changes in their lives and agrarian surroundings since the early 1970s. In both regions, significant transformations driven by modernising development have taken place in the last five decades. In the Indian context, many of these transformations are associated with the so-called Green Revolution, and have brought to farms many industrial technologies developed in electrical, mechanical, chemical and biological laboratories and testing grounds. Our focus in such modernising transformations was on the agency of impoverished people, in terms of the many ways in which they negotiate with material interventions in their agrarian lives while also living amidst social structures (like those of caste and gender). Through oral history interviews, we approached people’s memories not as chronological recalling of events in the form of ‘facts’, but rather as reflections on and interpretations of processes of change. Our initial interviews were open-ended as possible and asked participants to recall and elaborate on critical events that shaped their lives. After developing rapport and familiarity we began asking more focused questions about changes in livelihood practices, memories of agricultural industrialisation as well as related processes of transformations in their social, political and economic life. Recognising the difficulties people often encounter in articulating exclusionary experiences and other hardships in their lives, we used a conversational mode so people could enunciate self-representations of classed and gendered positions. Our interviews reveal not just the immutability of such positions but also the possibilities for sociopolitical transformation. Even as they pose interpretive challenges and limitations, valuable about the personal narratives constructed out of oral history interviews, is the collaborative process ( between researchers and interviewees) of assigning multidimensional significance to concepts of agency, power and ways-of-relating.