Amorette Lyngwa is a doctoral student in history with a focus on modern South Asia from Shillong, India. She earned her B.A. in communication studies from Mount Carmel College and M.A. in public history and heritage interpretation from the Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, both in Bangalore, India, and now studies the urban and social history of Shillong through a community-focused perspective under the guidance of Durba Ghosh at Cornell.
What is your area of research and why is it important?
I work on the urban and social history of Shillong, in Northeast India, through a community-focused perspective, centering the city’s Indigenous residents as narrators and protagonists in its story. I am mostly interested in the way the city and its people transformed from the time it was established as a colonial hill-station on the frontiers of British India in the 19th century to its contemporary position as a state capital that remains marked by narratives of remoteness. My work aims to bring a historically marginalized and underrepresented region and community in South Asia into focus, but through the community’s own voices. I’m curious about the worlds that different people made within the city and in the way in which they remember and make meaning out of these worlds. I envision historical research as a collaborative process, so I use a combination of methods and sources such as oral history, Indigenous methodologies, and archival research to get at a bottom-up history of the city that is multilayered and diverse.
What are the larger implications of this research?
In my research, I center mostly Indigenous, community voices from a region of India that has been perceived as remote and has been historically marginalized structurally, socially, and politically, connecting an often-overlooked part of South Asia to global conversations on Indigeneity, decolonization, and the afterlives of Empire. This not only allows for more representation and visibility for this one community, but also adds to the corpus of knowledge about the Global South coming from the region itself. Because I focus on Indigenous worldviews and community narratives through oral histories, it also allows for a way to rethink how historical research, especially concerning Indigenous communities, can be done. Lastly, my project demonstrates what peripheral cities (or even smaller towns) in the edges of South Asia can offer to our collective knowledge about global currents of history such as colonialism and modernity.
Read the full interview on the Cornell University Graduate School website.
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