Diaspora women oral histories

Collecting women’s accounts in Southall

Filmmaker Sheba Remy Kharbanda describes Vilayati Tarti, or Foreign Land, as an oral-history project centred on Southall and neighbouring areas. Its participants were South Asian women, mostly Punjabi, who migrated to England for work in the decades following Partition. Kharbanda links the project to her maternal grandmother, who lived and died in Southall. That family connection explains the collector’s starting point without making every participant’s experience identical to her grandmother’s. The project description identifies an eleven-minute documentary short and eighteen stand-alone video interviews intended as an electronic resource. Those are different forms: an edited short selects and arranges material, while separate interviews preserve longer individual accounts. The published description establishes the collection’s design, not everything said in the recordings.[1]

An interview can change a historian’s questions

In her 2024 book Women and the Sikh Diaspora in California, Nicole Ranganath explains how an autobiographical song by interviewee Harbans Kaur Panu redirected her research towards women’s singing. Her introduction describes interviews about the meanings of hymns, folk songs and autobiographical compositions, discussed in Punjabi and English. She situates the study among women who grew up in Punjab villages in the 1930s and 1940s. This is a particular historical cohort, not a claim about all contemporary Punjabi women. Ranganath also documents women learning Gurmukhi and preparing prayer books for a women’s group. Such details bring everyday creative and organisational work into the historical record, rather than restricting the story to formal leaders.[2]

Reading the collection and the published interpretation

An edited documentary and a collection of separate interviews offer different routes through the same Southall project. The collector’s description helps a reader distinguish the curated short from the interview resource, without treating either as a statistical sample of Punjabi women.[1]

Ranganath’s explanation instead shows how repeated encounters could change a historian’s method. This article draws on the published book’s account of those interviews; it does not claim independent access to the performances or to recordings of the women themselves.[2]