Mandhari’s interview does not unfold like a written biography. One memory leads naturally into another: marriage, India, work, food, festivals, illness, old social rules, letters, farming, music, loss and the changes she has watched take place around her.
Put together, those memories offer something larger than the story of one person. They preserve details of everyday life that are easily lost when history is recorded only through dates, major events and official documents.
A childhood shaped by the customs of the time
Mandhari remembers being married when she was still a child. She says she was nine years old when the marriage took place. The introduction to the episode also records that she became a mother while still very young.
The conversation makes clear how different marriage could be from the expectations many people have today. Questions of personal choice, seeing or knowing a future husband, family decisions and the customs surrounding marriage all appear in her memories.
Later in the interview, when she is asked to compare older marriage customs with those of the present, Mandhari does not simply say that everything from the past was better. Her response favours the way marriage is approached today. That contrast is important: remembering the past does not necessarily mean wanting every part of it back.
Seven years in India
Migration is another part of Mandhari’s story. She recalls going to India and, when asked how long she stayed there, answers that she lived there for seven years.
The interview returns to India at different points, including when discussing family life, illness and travel. Some of the exact places and sequence of events are difficult to recover from the surviving transcript, but India was clearly more than a passing journey in her life.
Her memories also touch on a period when travel itself was a very different experience. She recalls travelling by aeroplane and becoming sick during the journey. It is a small memory, but one that captures what unfamiliar forms of transport could feel like to someone encountering them in a very different period of life.
Women’s work did not stop at the doorway
When the interview turns to the difference between the lives of men and women, Mandhari describes a world in which women carried a heavy share of work.
Household responsibilities were only part of it. Women also worked outside, including agricultural and other physical work. Her account does not present domestic life and farming life as two separate worlds. For many women, they were part of the same working day.
This section of the interview gives us a useful record of labour that often goes undocumented. Work done inside the home, in fields and through cooperation between households may never appear in employment records, but it was central to keeping families alive.
When even a rupee mattered
Mandhari also remembers a time when cash was difficult to come by. During a conversation about the value of money, she recalls how significant even one rupee could be.
One of her lighter memories concerns money received from her maiti, her parental home. She remembers using it to buy small treats and eating them secretly. Coconut and mishri are among the treats recalled in the conversation.
The memory may sound simple, but it tells us something about childhood pleasure, access to money and the value of purchased food at a time when families depended far more heavily on what they produced themselves.
The taste and smell of food
Food runs throughout Mandhari’s memories.
In the introduction to her story, she remembers fruit and vegetables as having a different taste and smell in the past. The smell of vegetables cooking in one house could be noticed from neighbouring homes.
The interview later moves through the foods associated with everyday life and celebrations. Kheer and khaja appear in her memories of festive eating, while foods such as dhido, roti and maize belong to the wider picture of everyday food.
These memories are not simply a list of dishes. They describe a food system in which growing, storing, cooking and sharing food were closely connected to the seasons, the household and the land.
Festivals were occasions to prepare and share
When asked how festivals were celebrated in earlier times, Mandhari remembers them as occasions that people celebrated with enthusiasm.
Food was an important part of those celebrations. Families prepared what was available to them and reserved particular foods for special occasions.
Her memories also show the difference between abundance today and scarcity in the past. What might now be readily available could once have required saving, searching, growing or waiting for a particular season or celebration.
The old rules of “nachhune”
One of the most important parts of the interview concerns the practice commonly described as “nachhune” — restrictions placed on girls and women during menstruation.
Mandhari recalls rules about separation and touching. The conversation also refers to women being kept apart from normal household life and discusses the places where they were expected to stay.
When the interviewers ask about the reasoning behind those practices and whether they were right, Mandhari places them in the social world of that time. Her answer reflects the reality that people often followed the customs that surrounded them because those were the accepted rules of their community.
This part of the interview is especially valuable because it records an everyday social practice from the perspective of someone who actually lived through it.
Illness before easy access to hospitals
Healthcare is another area where Mandhari’s memories show how much everyday life has changed.
The conversation turns to what happened when people became sick before hospitals and modern medical services were easy to reach. Local and traditional forms of treatment were part of that world, and serious illness could become far more dangerous when treatment was unavailable or difficult to obtain.
Her memories are a reminder that changes in transport, hospitals and medicine did not simply bring new technology. They changed a family’s chances of getting help when somebody became seriously ill.
Marriage, dowry and customs that changed
Marriage returns repeatedly throughout the interview, but not only through Mandhari’s own marriage.
The conversation expands into dowry, payments connected with marriage, remarriage and older customs surrounding relationships between families. Later sections also touch on practices connected with a man taking another wife and the customary idea of “jari”.
These sections reveal that marriage was not simply a private relationship between two individuals. It could involve parents, money, property, community rules and social expectations.
Mandhari’s willingness to say that some present-day practices are better makes this part of her testimony particularly important. Her memories preserve the old system without requiring us to romanticise it.
Before phones, there were letters
Another striking part of the conversation begins when the interviewers ask how people communicated with relatives or others living far away before phones became common.
Letters were part of that communication.
When asked how long a letter could take to arrive, Mandhari’s answer indicates that it could take around a month.
Today, a message can cross countries in seconds. In the world Mandhari remembers, writing a letter, sending it and waiting for a reply could take weeks. Distance was measured not only in kilometres, but in waiting.
Growing enough to survive the year
The interview also preserves memories of farming, grain and household food security.
Families depended heavily on what they could grow. Grain was stored for later use, including in traditional bhakari storage. The conversation considers what happened when the food produced by a household was not enough to last the entire year.
That reality shaped relationships between families as well. A poor harvest or an insufficient store of grain was not simply an agricultural problem; it could determine how a household survived until the next crop.
Mandhari’s account helps document an economy in which cash was limited and food itself was one of the most important forms of security.
Songs, dancing and the social life around work
Not every memory in the interview is about hardship.
Mandhari remembers singing and dancing, and the conversation eventually turns toward the songs people used to sing. Parts of the interview itself become a space for remembering those older sounds.
Music and dance belonged to the social life of the community. They sat alongside work, marriage, festivals and gatherings rather than existing as something separate from everyday life.
Even where individual words of the old songs are now difficult to recover clearly, the fact that they remain in memory is itself significant.
A life measured through change
As the interview moves forward, the questions become less about individual customs and more about life itself.
The conversation turns to hardship, losing people close to us, companionship, living independently, happiness and what allows a person to continue through difficult periods.
That is where the many smaller memories begin to connect.
Mandhari has lived through a world in which the meaning of money changed, transport changed, communication changed, access to healthcare changed, marriage practices changed, the work expected of women changed and many old social restrictions began to be questioned.
Yet some of the memories she carries are extremely ordinary: the taste of food, a sweet bought with a little money, waiting for a letter, working to make grain last through the year, celebrating a festival, singing a song.
Those ordinary details are exactly why oral history matters.
Official history can tell us when roads were built, when technologies arrived or when laws changed. A conversation like Mandhari’s tells us what those changes felt like inside a household: what people ate, how women worked, how families communicated, what customs they obeyed, how far money went and which parts of the past they themselves believe were worth leaving behind.
That is the history Katha Hijo Ko exists to preserve.
