Voices of the Village: Documenting Oral Histories Before They Are Lost
Our community documentation project has recorded over 300 hours of oral histories from elders across 12 villages — a race against time to preserve living knowledge.
Before the Last Storyteller Passes
Dil Bahadur Rokaya is 87 years old. He lives alone in a two-room house in Lekhgaun, a village in the hills above Birendranagar. He has survived famine, political upheaval, the death of three children, and the slow disappearance of the world he was born into. And he knows things that no one else alive knows — the exact steps of a ritual dance performed at the founding of the village, the names of medicinal plants that grow only in one specific valley, the genealogy of the local chieftain families going back twelve generations.
If Dil Bahadur Rokaya dies without being recorded, that knowledge dies with him.
This is the reality that drives Panchapuri Museum's community oral history project, now in its third year. Working with a team of trained community interviewers and an advisory board of local historians, we have so far documented over 300 hours of testimony from 47 elders across 12 villages in Surkhet District.