Contribute

The person who does the asking should never be a stranger. It should be someone the teller already knows.

You do not need to be a researcher and you do not need to travel. The most useful thing anybody can do for this project is to record a conversation they were going to have anyway, with a grandparent or a neighbour, and send it in with the name of the village.

The twelve questions

Never open with tell me your story, because nobody has one ready. Ask about a place and the rest follows. Ask in Punjabi if you both speak it. Let them go off the subject, because the digression is usually the story.

Which village are we from, and who else lived there when you were young?
What is the oldest thing in the village, and who looks after it?
Who was the oldest person you remember as a child, and what did they talk about?
Was there a well, and whose bullocks turned the wheel?
What did the fields grow before they grew what they grow now?
Who left, and where did they go, and did they come back?
Who came, and where did they come from?
Is there a building nobody uses any more, and whose was it?
What did people do at a wedding that they do not do now?
Was there anybody from the village who became known, for anything at all?
What happened here that people still argue about?
What would you want written down before it goes?

How to send it

A phone recording is fine. Audio is better than video for a nervous teller, and a quiet room is worth more than a good microphone. Say the village name and the date out loud at the start of the recording, and ask the teller, on the recording and in their own language, whether they are happy for it to be kept and used. That spoken consent is better evidence than a form nobody read, and it works for a contributor who cannot read one.

You choose who can hear it

Some of the most valuable material in Punjab is the material a family cannot publish openly, and a platform that only accepts open contributions will never receive it. Every recording carries an access level, set by the person who sent it and changeable afterwards:

Public. Anyone can listen and read.
Village. Held and indexed, released only to people from that place.
Family. Kept, transcribed, and shown to nobody outside it.
Sealed. Closed for a number of years that you set.

Withdrawal works. If a family asks for a recording to be removed, it goes from storage, from the index, and from the search, together and permanently.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, that is worth as much as a new account. Say which story, which sentence, and how you know. Village-level corrections from people who live there take precedence over anything compiled at a desk, including everything on this site.