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Three ways in — pick the size that fits your life

Most people who want to help never start, because "help preserve our heritage" is too large a thing to begin. So here it is broken into three honest sizes. The first takes ten minutes. Nobody is expected to do all three.

Become a Village Champion

There are twenty-nine villages in this directory and one project trying to document all of them. That arithmetic does not work. It works if each village has one person who owns its page.

A Village Champion is not a title or a committee post. It means you are the person who answers when someone asks a question about your village — and the person whose name appears on that page as having documented it. What we would ask of you:

• Sit with two or three of the oldest people in the village and write down what they say.
• Photograph what exists — the temple, the old haveli, any carved stone, the step-well, the cremation ground memorials.
• Ask two or three families whether they keep any old papers, and photograph what they are willing to show.
• Send it in, in whatever order it arrives. It does not need to be organised or written well. That part we can do.

That is the whole job, and it is finite. Most villages could be documented in a few weekends by one determined person. These nine have nothing yet: Luna, Mootai, Dholasar, Chapasar, Ranisar, Ladiya, Pipasar, Shevdi and Shri Balaji. If one of them is yours, it is waiting for you specifically.

Choose Village Admin or Representative in the form below and name your village — or simply tell us on WhatsApp →

Record an elder — this month, not next year

Everything else on this site can be done later. A manuscript in an archive will still be there in ten years. The memory of a person aged eighty-five will not. Every year we wait, some of this record is lost in a way that no amount of money or research recovers.

You need no equipment and no training. A phone, a voice note, and half an hour. Do not worry about sound quality or whether the answers wander — a wandering answer often carries the detail nobody thought to ask for. Ten questions that work:

Send the voice note exactly as recorded. Nothing needs transcribing first, and please do not tidy up what they said. Send a recording →

Oral testimony is recorded on this site as oral tradition and marked as such — not because it matters less than a document, but because a reader deserves to know which kind of evidence they are reading.

Let the young record the old

The best heritage project we could run costs nothing: a student, their own grandparent, and the ten questions above. It captures the oldest generation's memory using the youngest generation's phone — and along the way a young person finds out that the history they were taught in a textbook runs through their own house.

We invite schools and colleges in and around Phalodi to set this as a holiday or term assignment. We will supply the question sheet and a simple submission format, credit every student by name on the village page their work contributes to, and give recognition to the strongest submissions. Teachers who would like to run it can write to us through the form below or on WhatsApp.

A single school term, done properly, would likely produce more oral history than a year of appeals to adults — and it would leave behind something better than a documented archive: a generation that knows why it matters.

Register your interest

Tell us what you would like to do and how much time you honestly have. "Not sure yet" is a perfectly good answer — we would rather know you exist.

Prefer to just send a message? Reach us on WhatsApp →

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