We work to expand and carefully manage our oral history collection, ensuring each story is preserved, organized, and accessible to audiences.
Core Team
Malvika has a BA in History from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and an MA in Heritage Education and Interpretation from Newcastle University, UK. She spent the early part of her career working in the field of museum and heritage education, as well as building audio guides for historic sites across India and the world. She continues to consult with museums and heritage organisations around India. Since 2017, Malvika has built The Citizens’ Archive of India to be a digital oral history archive that meets international standards. Malvika believes history is best brought alive through storytelling and engaging with material memory. She hopes to do just that through CAI.
Antara is a video editor from Mumbai, working primarily with educational content. She has been with the Citizens’ Archive of India since 2018 and has previously worked with the science education company JoVE. The work of the archivists and historians at CAI inspired in her a desire to share the extraordinary stories found in seemingly ordinary moments in Indian history.
Project Partners
Ekta Chauhan holds a PhD in World Heritage Studies from Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus (Germany). She currently teaches at OP Jindal Global University. She conducts research on themes related to oral history, urban and heritage policy, sustainable tourism, anthropology, and comparative cultural analysis. She runs “Dilli Ki Khirki” in collaboration with The Citizens’ Archive of India. The project digitally documents the personal narratives of the residents of urban villages located in Delhi. Her aim is to analyse the history and urban expansion of the “sheher” (Delhi) through its “gaon” (villages).
Jane is a senior journalist and editor from Mumbai. She has co-authored ‘Mafia Queens of Mumbai: Stories of Women from the Ganglands (2011)’ with S. Hussain Zaidi. Her debut novel, Bombay Balchão, was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puruskar and Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize. In 2022, she won the RedInk Journalism Award in the lifestyle and entertainment category. Having spent over two decades in the South Mumbai neighbourhood of Cavel, once the nerve centre for migrating Christians from Goa and Mangalore, she took an interest in researching their stories. With Soboicar, she hopes to create a portrait of a community that influenced Mumbai's cultural, social, and built fabric.
Rini Rayna is a researcher, writer and editor based in Navi Mumbai, India, whose practice focuses on the interconnections between objects, rituals and memory in everyday life. She has worked for independent publications to document regional visual and material cultures and is also engaged in a collaborative research project that investigates the evolving ecologies of photobooks in South Asia. As the founder of Poorvapar, she deliberately deploys listening and digitisation as tools to record nuanced, personal histories that connect Bihar, its neighbouring regions and their citizens across diverse geographies and generations.
Dr. Nirali Patel is an MD Radiologist based in Mumbai, with a strong interest in the intersections of medicine, public health, and storytelling. A personal family experience with tuberculosis led her to look beyond clinical diagnoses and recognize the disease as deeply complex and often misunderstood. As a collaborator on Shared Breath, a tuberculosis oral history project with the Citizens’ Archive of India, she seeks to explore its emotional, social, and lived dimensions through personal narratives. She believes that while illness is often forgotten once treatment ends, remembering can spark more meaningful public conversations and bring overlooked perspectives to light. She has also designed a heritage walk in Bombay that briefly explores how health and disease have shaped the city’s past.
