History for Peace

27/10/2026

What if students encounter history not as a finished narrative, but as an archive of fragments from which historical accounts have to be constructed?

What if we could shift learning from memorizing textbook facts to active historical inquiry?

This year the History for Peace Professional Development Course for high school educators invites teachers to think critically about archives and to explore how archival materials can help students develop an understanding of historical thinking by asking questions of evidence, identifying provenance, recognising perspective and bias, reading silences and absences, corroborating sources and distinguishing between the past and the histories we construct about it.

Online
13, 20, 27 November 2026. 5.30 - 7.30 p.m.

DETAILS HERE
https://www.historyforpeace.pw/post/engaging-with-archives-professional-development-course-2026

06/10/2026

History for Peace and Waypoint present

A Taste of Time
Readings and Conversation with author Mohona Kanjilal and Vibha Mitra

Sunday, 11 October 2026. 11 a.m.
at
Waypoint
32b, Sarat Bose Road
[opp Samilton Hotel
Calcutta 700020

Calcutta, once the nucleus of the Raj, was at the heart of a thriving economy and unparalleled administration. Over the centuries, this teeming, cosmopolitan metropolis has become home to people from various communities who have lent its food and culture their distinctive tastes and culinary rituals.

A Taste of Time is an insightful journey through the ever-changing landscape of Calcutta’s food and cultural milieu, from its decades-old cutlet, jhal muri and puchka stalls to its iconic continental restaurants like Firpo’s and Flurys; from its oldest tea shop, Favourite Cabin, set up in 1924, to the 21st-century fine-dining restaurant threesixtythreeo. Mohona Kanjilal, through her immaculate research, deftly captures the stories behind the city’s endearing culture of ‘bikel chaar-ter cha’ (tea at 4 p.m.); its renowned bakeries like Nahoum’s; and the invention of rasogollas and samosas (or shingara). Diving into Calcutta’s dazzling history, she explores how the food habits of early European settlers, Jewish, Armenian, Chinese, Parsi and other expats, and the city’s next-door neighbours like Darjeeling and Odisha, have made the culinary fabric of Calcutta immensely rich and layered.

Mohona Kanjilal was born in Kolkata and spent most of her childhood in Bengaluru. She began her career in Kolkata as a freelance journalist. It was during her stint with the newspapers that she got bitten by the writing bug and ventured into full-time writing. A Taste of Time is her third book and first work of non-fiction. Prior to this book, she authored two short-story collections. She is an alumnus of Loreto College, Kolkata.

Vibha Mitra tackles life head-on, blending crosswords, Scrabble and films into her vibrant world. She earned top ranks in her CA Inter and Final exams and completed a Law degree, choosing to pause a PwC career to raise her two children. Vibha then channelled her drive into entrepreneurship, founding Opus (test prep), Qissaa (textiles) and its digital expansion, Qissaa Buddy (a shopping companion). Beyond commerce, she champions heritage preservation through Own The Past and is the author of Odds and Bends, an eccentric essay collection exploring life's unexpected twists.

30/09/2026

History for Peace presents

First Bite: Breakfast Stories from Urban India
Readings and Conversation with author Priyadarshini Chatterjee and Ranita Ray

Priyadarshini and Ranita will explore the idea of 'breakfast as history, habit and everyday necessity', travelling across ten cities of India. The conversation will meander around how identities shape and are shaped by the food we love and keep returning to.

Saturday, 3 October 2026. 5 p.m.

Priyadarshini Chatterjee is an independent food, culture, and travel writer. She divides her time between Mumbai and Kolkata. A frequent contributor to Mint, her work has also appeared in a number of national and international publications, including Eater, The Synonym, The BBC, Condé Nast Traveller India, Whetstone Magazine, Scroll.in, The Hindu BusinessLine and Lonely Planet India, among others.

She graduated with honours in political science from the University of Calcutta, followed by a postgraduate degree in media and cultural studies from the University of Sussex. But her heart lay in writing. She returned to India and worked for a while on the features teams of different publications, before quitting her job to write independently.

She chose food as her area of exploration, dabbling in different genres of food writing—from blogging about family recipes to critiquing restaurants—before focusing her work on the intersections of food, history, and culture.

A recipient of the Kalpalata Fellowship for Food Writing for two consecutive terms, she has also been on various panels and juries at literature festivals and restaurant awards. Her debut book First Bite: Breakfast Stories from Urban India, published by Speaking Tiger, was released in March 2026.

Ranita Ray enjoys teaching, playing music and creating, actively thinking and talking about food.

12/09/2026

The Community Library Project and History for Peace present
The Madness of Partition and the Partition of Madness

An interactive session with Sanjeev Jain and Alok Sarin

Saturday, 19 September 2026, 5 p.m. at
The Community Library Project
South Ex, Kotla

Sanjeev Jain is a professor emeritus at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bengaluru.
His interests are in molecular genetics and the history of psychiatry.
He has been a practicing psychiatrist all his life.

Alok Sarin is a consultant psychiatrist practicing at the Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research, New Delhi.
His interests are the history of psychiatry and the interspaces of society and psychiatry.

12/09/2026

What happens when history goes beyond the classroom into the campus?
At MAHE Bengaluru, three History students became the first History for Peace Ambassadors, leading their peers to think about war, memory, identity and belonging through films and historical narratives.
Here are some thoughts from the ambassadors:

'The experience made me more conscious of whose voices are remembered, whose are marginalized and how representations of the past influence our understanding of the present. I am grateful for the opportunity to engage in history through writing, film, and discussion.'
Yash

'We were truly mindful of our position in presenting the narrative and strived to use that authority in a fair, unbiased and positive manner.'
Avishi

'Researching the histories of various communities, especially lesser-known or underrepresented communities, has shown that understanding their perspectives should be important to history.'
Aditya

Click here for project details and the full report.
https://www.historyforpeace.pw/post/history-for-peace-ambassadors-project

08/09/2026

So many of us remember with the greatest delight reading (or perhaps watching) the stories of Vikram and Vetal. But going beyond the dark yet captivating tales around a corpse/vampire, can something invented, improbable be thought of as history? Stories conjure up an imagination of the past even if they are refracted images or fragments that do not add up to a whole.



What happens when a story survives for centuries— travels across time and tellers, crossing languages, cultures and generations, changing each time it is told? Is it still a story? Can it be treated like a source? A version of the past? Or something historians have been overlooking? What happens when historians and storytellers encounter the same past? And what might historians learn by listening to the storyteller? Can the story reveal something about the past that an archive cannot? A historian searches for evidence, weighs sources and constructs an argument. A storyteller reaches for imagination, character and the power of a good tale. But are the two really as far apart as we imagine?

Taking up the gory and compelling Tale of the Transposed Heads as a starting point, Meera Visvanathan in her talk at the annual conference at Calcutta last year, unsettles the neat boundary between history and storytelling to explore the answers to these questions. Because perhaps the real question is not whether stories tell the truth but rather what truths do stories allow us to remember. She invites us to look afresh at the relationship between fact, interpretation and imagination—and to ask not simply what happened, but how we come to tell the story of what happened.

Click here for the full transcript of the talk.
https://www.historyforpeace.pw/post/the-historian-and-the-storyteller

22/07/2026

History, is never solely about what has been; it is equally about why the past continues to matter in the present. The past is immutable; history is its interpretation. Every generation revisits the past with new questions, concerns, and anxieties, producing what may be understood as histories of the present—interpretations that illuminate contemporary realities by tracing their historical formation. To that end, it is not simply a record of what happened but an ongoing dialogue between evidence, memory, and interpretation. The enduring challenge is therefore not only to reconstruct the past but also to interrogate the assumptions that shape its telling, making history a critical and inclusive interplay between the past and the present.

As historians sift through the fragments of time, they do not merely recover what has been; they construct narratives that shape how societies understand themselves, remember their pasts, and imagine their futures. In doing so, they remind us that history is never a finished account but a continuous dialogue between the past and the present. It is this enduring dialogue that returns us to the eternal question—What is History?

As we approach the 2026 edition of the Annual History for Peace Conference, we are pleased to revisit the lectures that were delivered across three conferences in 2024/25

Download the digital journals here
https://www.historyforpeace.pw/journals

15/05/2026

The All India Radio was modelled after the BBC, to carry out the mandate of ‘Education, Information, Entertainment’. This is the mode of media communication that had perhaps the most outreach in the nascent independent Indian state. It was the state's arm to mould the new citizen of independent India. And so, what could and could not be aired was a matter of deep concern to the state. . . READ MORE HERE https://bit.ly/4uPdbWu to get a glimpse of what this year's annual conference covers.

REGISTER HERE. https://bit.ly/4dskagW

The annual History for Peace Conference 20266, 7, 8 August 2026CalcuttaThe Tollygunge ClubA mountain is making its way to you, guns blazing. Will you persist?—Naveen Kishore Yes, indeed. We must.At a recent History for Peace conference, Anirudh Kanisetti spoke of a society-wide pattern that we are...

13/05/2026

Its that time of the year again!
Details coming soon . . .

20/03/2026

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/yrjrkrpx