Travelling Voices

In the 1970s, when the bazaars first came to Uttarakhand’s Munsyari village, people began to purchase grain instead of growing it. Barley, one of the crops native to the region, slowly diminished in quantity and purpose. Rekha Rautela, who wrote about this, learnt about the rise and fall of the grain in her village through scattered accounts and personal reflections. Her memories of barley fields, however, are deeply personal and capture aspects of her identity and culture. Rautela’s story was published three months ago in Voices of Rural India, a non-profit online platform for rural storytellers founded in August 2020.

carries digital snapshots of people both similar to, and different from, Rautela. The website functions as co-founder, who felt that the pandemic made a “digital nomad” out of her. She reached out to her friend Malika Virdi, who runs the tourism organisation Himalayan Ark, and Osama Manzar, founder of the non-profit Digital Empowerment Foundation, to see if a digital platform could be fashioned around travel stories. The desire to tell and, more importantly, listen to stories, gave them a shared context.