Amidst the growing influence of artificial intelligence, preserving personal histories gains particular significance. Shika Budhu notes that the art of storytelling is deeply rooted in Indian culture, including Hindu traditions, where stories were passed down through generations via mythology, sacred texts, performing arts, and oral tradition.
The author shares her personal experience when her grandfather, Girdar Ramnat, decided to record his life story at the age of 80. These recordings prompt the author to question the purpose of documenting life experiences. Reading his works, the author discovers accounts of a loving grandfather, a skilled farmer, and one of the smartest people she knew before fourteen years old.
The records reveal that her grandfather wrote plays, poems, and stories, both real and fictional. Working as a teacher and principal, he staged school productions, observing people and transforming life experiences into narratives. The author found echoes of her own creative inclinations in his work, which she believes is one of the beautiful aspects of intergenerational storytelling—the ability to know oneself by looking back.
Family stories are not just amusing anecdotes shared over dinner; they are fragments of history. They reveal a family's origins, the values it held dear, the difficulties it overcame, moments of joy, and how the family coped with a constantly changing world.
The author recalls growing up among creative people, including an uncle who was a legendary comedian in Durban. His jokes continue to live in people's memories, much like the stories written by her grandfather serve as a time capsule reflecting a lived life. Other family members enrich daily life with music, art, poetry, and cuisine, turning the ordinary into something extraordinary.
Although storytelling is deeply connected to Indian culture, it is not exclusive to it. Studying literature, theater, or history makes it clear that every culture is built on stories. People crave them because they themselves are stories. Therefore, preserving our stories is especially important during Heritage Month. Heritage is not just a memory of ancestors' origins, but also an understanding of the path that led us to who we are today in this place and time.
The history of South Asian Indians cannot be reduced to a single narrative. It is a rich tapestry of migration, hardship, resilience, adaptation, religion, food, language, music, humor, family, and community, as well as the exceptional ability to create a home in a changing landscape. However, these stories exist not only in archives and textbooks; they live in the tales of grandparents, in the cherished memories of cousins, in family recipes kept only in someone's memory, and in stories of arrival, departure, survival, success, failure, and love.
If no one records these stories, they will disappear. By telling them, we are not necessarily dictating what future generations should think; we are providing them with material for reflection. This is why the author and her husband launched the #WriteON project, helping people preserve their stories even if they don't know where to start. Sometimes this means transforming years of oral memories into a written family chronicle.
This process evokes deep emotion because the value of a story lies not in whether it becomes a bestseller; often its most important audience is a grandchild many years later who suddenly understands something about the person who lived before them. We exist because of the past, and to nourish the present, we must remember the nature from which we came.
At the same time, while encouraging people to share their stories, it is important to remember that what we read shapes the stories we will tell. The author recently studied the works of local South African writers such as Felicity Twindhurst, Arvashni Siripat, Shahika Murut, Nava Naidu, and others. Their diverse perspectives demonstrate that there is not a lack of material, but rather a vast amount awaiting its time.
During Heritage Month, it is recommended to document something: open a notebook, start a document, record a grandmother's conversation, ask your father about his first job. It is important to cherish our stories. We need to learn the origin of a family recipe, write about the house where we grew up, about the songs we remember, about the family's arguments and laughter. A story does not have to be perfect; it just needs to exist. Modern desi history concerns not only our past, but also our present and what we leave behind for coming generations.