Tune into your roots

Preeti Deo (centre) spoke about her grandmothers tea-time gatherings in Durgapur

For 36-year-old Amrita Gangatirkar, a travel experience designer from Nashik, heritage is more than material possessions. It is the memory of the way her grandmother stitched her own clothes, the stories that lurk in every corner of her hometown, or turning to a family recipe for comfort. So, when the lockdown came into force, and Gangatirkar-s plans of documenting stories of wineries in Nashik took a backseat, she started noticing that a sizeable majority on social media was in some way or the other looking at the past for inspiration. Having worked as a researcher and filmmaker who covered communities, art, culture and heritage for years, Gangatirkar realised that she, too, could start her own project to find out what it means to go back to one-s roots. And out of a series of seven Instagram Live sessions with urban conservationists, archaeologists, directors and entrepreneurs, was born her podcast - Women Who Speak Heritage.

Amrita Gangatirkar

"I wanted to talk to them about how heritage is interpreted in our lives. What we wear and how we eat comes from our culture. We might know it, but we keep doing it. The lockdown forced us to gauge this behaviour, which is also linked to our heritage," says Gangatirkar. "I wanted to focus on three basic points - heritage documentation, conservation and revival," she explains, adding that she then reached out to friends and people whose works she had been following for years. One of them was author Preeti Deo, who shared everything, from the recipe of a zuchhini thalipeeth to how she recreated dishes from the Maharashtrian cookbook Ruchira in the UK. "She reminded me of the film Julie & Julia. She spoke of her ancestral home in Marathwada, her memory of her grandmother-s 4 pm tea-party, and through all of this, the story of the region-s cuisine, which is not widely spoken about," Gangatirkar tells us. Then, there was Yoginee Budhkar, a PhD in biotechnology, who unravelled the story behind mead. "That episode was a revelation for me. Budhkar is obsessed with honey bees. She told me about how mead is considered the ancient Indian potion that Gods used to consume. She elaborated on how it-s made and I got to know that people in Nashik are making mead with fruits like chikoo. I didn-t even know about them before she told me. There were fun facts about honey bees, too," she adds.

Gangatirkar-s grandmother, Vaijayanti Rajhans, who was the inspiration for the podcast cover

As someone who takes tourists through the bylanes of old Nashik, Gangatirkar knows that often, although people might want to learn about monuments or sites they visit, they do not know what iconography to look out for. "So many tourists visit the temples in Nashik, but leave without learning anything about their importance. So, in a session, historian and archaeologist Saili Palande Datar shared how to study a monument, and ways to appreciate a historical structure in India with reference to temple architecture," the travel experience designer tells us.

Historian Saili Palande Datar demystified temple iconography

Apart from them, she spoke to Shubhra Chatterji on documenting heritage through food, Sayalee Marathe on recreating traditional Maharashtrian jewellery in silver, Smita Babar on Art Deco architecture, and professor Sanjeevani Ayachit about Peshwa costumes. The common thread that all of them mentioned was the need to document lived heritage. "By the end of the seventh live, I realised I need to preserve the sessions, too. As the quality of the Instagram videos wasn-t great, I decided to turn them into podcasts, so that they remain out there in the world," she signs off.

Log on to Women Who Speak Heritage on Spotify

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