Songs of Labour: Living Archives

Namita Waikar is a writer, translator, and editor whose work engages deeply with questions of language, memory, and rural life in India. She is the Managing Editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), where she has led significant initiatives in multilingual publishing and oral history documentation, including the acclaimed Grindmill Songs Project. She is the author of Farmers Protest! A Movement for Our Times published in 2025, and The Long March, published in 2018.  Both books are widely regarded for their focus and insights into agrarian distress and social change in contemporary India.

Pratishtha Pandya is a poet, writer, editor and curator whose work focuses on memory, community knowledge, and everyday histories. A Senior Editor with the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), she contributes to projects that document lived experiences, language, and cultural traditions across the country.  Her practice brings together storytelling and archival research to foreground voices often absent from mainstream narratives. She curates PARI’s archive of Kutchi songs, known as Songs of the Rann. Pratishtha also leads the creative writing section at PARI. A bilingual poet, she writes in Gujarati and English, and has published two volumes of poems.