Microhistory goes Mainstream: How Instagram and heritage walks make the past personal

Andarse ki goli. That’s the latest old food discovery I chanced upon, thanks to Sohail Hashmi’s Instagram account @walkwithsohail. The oral historian describes it as a now-rare monsoon delicacy of deep-fried rice flour, sugar and sesame seeds. “Every gali, every mohalla, has that one snack that isn’t just food—it’s history, gossip and childhood rolled into one,” his post says. Sure enough, in Lucknow, “cultural storyteller” Maroof Culmen films the same treat with a local granny, making it “lived memory”.

As historical content grows, memories turn to memoirs, artifacts to anecdotes, nostalgia to narratives. We are hooked to history that is spiffy, pithy, personal and relatable —and not necessarily told by a trained historian.

Hashmi, 74, famous for his heritage walks around Delhi, joined Instagram in December 2024 and has already notched up over 130,000 followers. He is enjoying the medium that has connected him to a new audience. He says it’s how history is consumed now: “I was surprised at the speed at which my little reels circulated, and the questions and reactions they drew.” He calls it a good development: “A realisation that history shapes us in many ways is coming in. There’s a growing curiosity about our city, its people, food.”

It is a reason why micro history is having a moment.

Microhistory studies the past by zooming in on small units—people, events, communities, objects—that reveal the complexities of everyday life often missed in large-scale studies. There are numerous Instagram accounts that serve the segment like Unzip Delhi by anthropologist Anas Khan, Sikkawala by numismatist Shah Umair, Tiptopped on textiles and cultural history by Pritha Dasmahapatra, Lampglow by Deepthi Sasidharan, and Aanchal Malhotra’s digital heirloom archive Museum of Material Memory.

Harleen Singh, a Toronto-based writer, says this trend is a reaction against grand narratives that history books are crammed with. In 2018, he launched The Lost Heer Project on Instagram about the largely forgotten narratives of women in colonial Punjab, which later turned into a book. “We study about great kings and politicians but barely talk about ordinary people. People get interested when you talk about mundane things that have grand stories behind them. That’s why niches like food history and fashion history are popular now,” says the 30-year-old.

Singh’s own interest in history was sparked by the Partition experiences of his grandparents. He dug deep to bring out forgotten individuals who had led extraordinary lives. Like Hardevi Roshan Lal, the first Punjabi woman to start a magazine, Bharat Bhagini , and write a travelogue. Like Syeda Muhammadi Begum, the first woman editor in Punjab. Like Sarla Thakral, the first Punjabi woman in India to qualify as a pilot in 1936.

A NEW ERA

The time is right, says writer Anirudh Kanisetti. A tech graduate, he found his calling in medieval history and has written Lords of the Deccan and Lords of Earth and Sea . “Until recently, there was a belief that history must be learnt primarily from textbooks. There’s a positive and negative side to this social media explosion. On the plus side, anybody can talk about history and on the minus, anybody can talk about history,” he says.

Jason Steinhauer, author of History, Disrupted: How Social Media and World Wide Web Have Changed the Past , echoes Kanisetti’s dilemma in his newsletter. “How history online comes to our attention... has little to do with accuracy.” Instead, he says, the factors that bring online history content to our attention are algorithms, social networks, politics, commercial motivations, power dynamics and our own perceptions of history.

Is it a veracity vs virality game? Kanisetti says that in the first wave of online historical content, politically inspired misinformation had the first-mover advantage, but now we are in the second wave where passionate young folks are doing critical research. “Sometimes uncritical history becomes a gateway to more critical histories. The former helped by generating curiosity and interest.”


For Culmen, it’s all about telling people stories of Lucknow. A college dropout, he started with monuments but “I realised that there are other ways to look at history—with feeling and nostalgia. I feel younger people want to know what is there than what was there”. Culmen’s videos are costand time-intensive with each video taking at least a week to 15 days to shoot on a budget of Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh, because he wants the production quality to be high, cinematic and relatable to millennials and Gen Z. “My audience is anyone who wants to declutter their feed from fast-moving content. There’s enough content out there to get your dopamine hit; people should come to us for serotonin,” he says.

It’s not just creators; even commenters are invested. Dubai-based artist Vidhya, who follows accounts like @BrownHistory and @ HistoryPhotographed, says she always checks the comment section as it adds more layers to the discussion. It also encourages her to go down a rabbit hole of research. She’s all for the social media-fication of history, “History in school textbooks is being altered at the whims and fancies of administration. So I’d rather that we have other sources to learn, unlearn and question stuff.”

WALK DOWN HISTORY LANE

One way in which history is coming alive is through heritage walks. Being a tourist in your city is now a bona fide travel trend. This was not the case in 2009 when Vinay Parameswarappa founded Gully Tours. He says, “For those new to Bengaluru, these walks give a sense of community and ways to assimilate to it. For locals, it’s a way of discovering what’s new in their own backyard.” Gully Tours does private and public walks with routes like Colonial Crawl, which tracks the colonial history of Bengaluru, or Death by Dosa, a dosa trail of Chickpet Market.

Parameswarappa says it takes four-six months to devise one route. He also uses his research to showcase local leaders like Kengal Hanumanthaiah as well as interesting people like Coffee Pudi Sakamma, who established Sakamma’s Coffee brand in the 1920s. He says, “Every country goes through this change when they start looking inwards: it is our turn now to look for our stories.”


Searching for local stories is what led Hyderabad-based freelance journalist Yunus Lasania to start The Hyderabad History Project and his own heritage walks. His focus goes beyond the monuments and royals, he likes to document people and their life too. “I noticed that not many people know of important Hyderabadis. I want to present Hyderabad with a different perspective, basically local history with some global context.” Lasania and partner Samiya Shakir have launched Pazirai, a fourcourse Hyderabadi and Lucknowi dinner at a 125-year-old haveli. Pazirai is now booked for next two months.

Trivia trails are gaining ground. Most cities now have one: from Soul Travelling in Goa to Surat Heritage Project and Karwaan Heritage’s Basu Da’s Bombay that showcases the city as seen in the movies of Basu Chatterji.


Kochi-based Bony Thomas, 62, started Walk with Bony to show the social history of Mattancherry and Kochi. He first got interested in the city while illustrating NS Madhavan’s book Litanies of Dutch Battery .

One of the founding members of the KochiMuziris Biennale, Thomas started making what he calls micro documentaries. “I knew I had to make short content after noticing how my daughter uses social media. We keep it under 59 seconds,” he says. Some of his most watched videos are on Kappiri Thara (worship of the Black African), Pappanji (burning of a grandpa-like figure on New Year) and Fort Vypin that houses a Portuguese church. He’s currently busy collecting local folk songs to compile a repository.

Thomas says the most difficult part is research as most of the history is oral. Singh says working with social history is tough as most of it is imagined. “While researching, I realised that some of the information was sketchy. That’s when you have to use ‘informed imagination,’” he says.

CONNECT THE DOTS

What draws people—creators and followers—is a search for connection: to the past, to the present, to themselves. Nostalgia, says Culmen, is a big connect. “People who are away from Lucknow write to us on how they connected with our content. How it reminded them of times spent at naani ka ghar.”

Homes, particularly modern Delhi houses, are what archaeologist and curator Anica Mann documents on Instagram. She says Delhi—a city of migrants—has a distinct architectural language that is slowly dying as builder flats proliferate. “An East Delhi house is different from a Civil Lines home. Then there’s the history of DDA flats, and Tara apartments built by Charles Correa. But more than that, the story of a house is tied to the story of a neighbourhood,” says Mann.

Mann has a modus operandi: if a house is road-facing, she clicks a picture and posts without identifiable signs. For some, she drops a postcard to let her visit and for others she gets invited to. “The mission remains the same—document every modern house in the city. I want to move away from

Instagram to make the archive alive, concrete and searchable. I am also working on a grant proposal for the project,” she says.

Like Mann, many are seeking avenues away from Instagram. Thomas wants to start a podcast, Culmen wants to move to YouTube while Singh has shifted to Substack. For Mann, it was never about the algorithm right from her first post of a classic modern house in Defence Colony that is probably gone for good. She’s excited about the new outlook towards history. “India is steeped in history. Material history is already popular as it’s easier to access, but we have intangible histories of songs, perfumes, food that need to be told.”