Reviewing “Microhistory goes mainstream: How Instagram and heritage walks make the past personal” (The Economic Times, 7 September 2025)

In response to Nupur Amarnath’s article, “Microhistory goes mainstream: How Instagram and heritage walks make the past personal” (The Economic Times, 7 September 2025), I want to first humbly acknowledge the effort by the author to highlight how digital platforms are changing the way people engage with history.

As a historian specialising in Early Modern India, and an author of a book on microhistory in Routledge’s microhistories series (The Sky Poured Down Candy; Routledge, 2026), I do appreciate the intent behind the article. However, I must caution against conflating social media’s bite-sized content with the intellectual rigor and methodological depth that defines microhistory as a scholarly discipline.

The article’s focus, as I interpret it, is more about how history is being “brought to our homes” and made more relatable, what the author aptly terms “the social media-fication of history”. Perhaps that would have been a more precise framing than using the term microhistory, which carries with it a distinct historiographical tradition rooted in centuries of debate and methodological refinement. It seems that “microhistory” was deployed more as a buzzword than as an analytical category. True somewhere in the article it is defined as “[studying] 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”, yet there looms an oversimplification of the very historical method.

Microhistory is not simply local or oral traditions or intangible heritage, nor is it a catch-all for historical content that is short, consumable, or visually engaging. It is a method that seeks to reconstruct the lived experiences of individuals—often those at the margins of grand narratives—and uses those experiences to illuminate broader social, cultural, and political structures. Its purpose is not to produce “bite-sized history”, but to uncover how people in the past perceived themselves, how they navigated their world, and how their actions interacted with larger historical processes.

Heritage vs microhistory

A further instance of conflation is the author’s reliance on a creator’s statement that “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.” While the importance of tangible and intangible heritage (note: not history) cannot be understated, this example blurs the lines between heritage documentation and microhistorical inquiry; ignoring, at the same time, the basic difference between history - a deeply analytical study of the past based on evidence, and heritage - the inherited aspects of that past, with heritage studies involving the documentation and preservation of these aspects.

The distinction is clear from a creator’s perspective on architectural (material) heritage itself, quoted in the article - “The mission remains the same—document every modern house in the city”; emphasis on ‘document’.

Intangible heritage, in specific, refers to practices, expressions, knowledge systems, and cultural forms that communities inherit and transmit, such as oral traditions, culinary practices, music, and craft techniques. Documenting these forms is crucial to preserving cultural memory, but it is not equivalent to microhistory, which is an interpretive and analytical method of historical reconstruction.

Microhistory is not simply about collecting fragments of cultural practices or local customs. It is about rigorously situating those fragments within broader historical processes, exploring how individuals experienced, interpreted, and acted within their worlds. In other words, intangible heritage provides material for historical inquiry, but microhistory is the method through which historians analyse, contextualise, and narrate these materials within frameworks of power, structure, and lived experience.

Without this distinction, we risk reducing microhistory to a trendy label attached to curated fragments of cultural life, stripping away the analytical depth that allows us to understand how people of the past navigated meaning, conflict, and change.

The intellectual roots of microhistory

The origins of microhistory lie in a profound critique of traditional historiography. For centuries, historians operated within frameworks that sought universal explanations and grand narratives of human events. This was epitomised by the positivist belief that a single, all-encompassing history of the world could be written if enough empirical data were gathered. The cultural turn in history challenged these grand narratives by emphasising meaning, symbols, and discourse, but in doing so, it often risked becoming trapped in surface-level interpretations of past consciousness.

Microhistory emerged as a response, combining the strengths of both cultural and social history. As John Brewer observes, “social and cultural history unite in the micro-processes of everyday life”. How? Both social and cultural history share the goal of exploring the past, but they approach it from different angles using distinct methods.

Cultural history, for example, treats society as a web of meanings and symbols, with historians aiming to uncover how people made sense of their world. Yet this method has its limitations, as it often remains confined to the perspectives and understandings of the historical actors themselves. To overcome this, it is necessary to incorporate broader frameworks, like those used in social history, that seek to explain wider patterns and structures.

Microhistory, as a field, skillfully bridges these two approaches by closely examining how individuals experienced life, how they perceived themselves, and the meanings they attached to events, while also situating these experiences within larger historical forces and processes that shaped their world, often beyond their conscious awareness.

Unlike superficial portrayals of the past, microhistory, thus, embraces ambiguity and complexity. It does not seek to confirm preconceived notions, nor does it flatten the past into easily digestible narratives for contemporary consumption. Instead, it has at its foundation the key features discussed as under.

Features of microhistory

Micro-analysis: This involves an intensive study of a small unit—be it an individual, family, locality, or community—or even a singular event, to understand historical dynamics at the ground level. Notable examples of such work include Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre. My own research on a minor Mughal official, as explored in The Sky Poured Down Candy (read more about it in What is my book 'The Sky Poured Down Candy' about?), exemplifies this approach. By closely studying one petty official Abdul Jalil’s correspondence, the administrative challenges he faced, and his everyday struggles, and by bringing to the fore his socio-cultural world (from familial relation to his passion for collecting books and his poetic pursuits), I indeed traced broader patterns of Mughal imperial politico-economic decline.

Contextualisation: Importantly, microhistory is not simply anecdotal storytelling, as the author of the article would have us believe; it situates the subject within broader historical, political, and economic frameworks. A petty official like Abdul Jalil’s personal frustrations, for example, may be rooted in systemic issues like fiscal strain, factional rivalries, or shifting imperial priorities. In fact, Ginzburg famously transformed what might have been a mere footnote in a broader study of the Protestant Reformation in Europe into an entire book keeping its context very much intact. Similarly, Indian microhistorical work A Princely Impostor? by Partha Chatterjee retold the Kumar of Bhawal case unfolding in colonial Bengal. On the face of it, it is a recollection of an event and maybe a biographical account of an individual, but at its contextual heart it is known to be the “secret history” of Indian nationalism. Whatever the form, the context remains intact.

Narrative reconstruction and agency: The microhistorical approach seeks to tell a story that is coherent yet faithful to the fragmentary nature of historical sources. It wrestles with gaps, silences, and ambiguities rather than glossing them over, thereby preserving the texture of lived experience. Perhaps most crucially, microhistory restores agency to individuals often overlooked in grand narratives. It recognises that historical actors were not passive recipients of events but interpreters, decision-makers, and participants in shaping their lives and societies.

Microhistory and the “micro” misunderstanding

The prefix “micro” in microhistory does not refer to the length of content. To quote from Amarnath’s article:

One of the founding members … 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.

However, the “micro” of microhistory refers to the scale of inquiry—a singular event or an ordinary individual, for instance—how deep, how granular, yet how interconnected the analysis is. A social media post may be “micro” in size, but it rarely meets the complete criteria of micro-analysis, contextual depth, narrative integrity, and restoring agency.

Oversimplifying microhistory into reels and posts risks turning it into a hollow label, stripped of the critical, analytical, and ethical commitments that define it.

Let us then refrain from believing that short-form content about quirky local histories or isolated anecdotes constitutes microhistory. I appreciate this attempt to re-define the “micro” in microhistory, but in doing so, in my opinion, it diminishes the discipline and ignores the labour, rigour, and interpretive frameworks that historians bring to bear when uncovering the past’s complexity.

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The mainstreaming of historical content through platforms like Instagram and heritage walks is an exciting development that broadens access and democratises history (I too wrote a hopefully relatable essay on this very platform, What do two microhistories and one Bollywood film have in common?) However, it is imperative that we distinguish between content that is simply “small” or “relatable” and scholarship that is methodologically grounded.

Microhistory is a powerful tool for illuminating the textures of lived experience and the structures that shape them. Therefore, it deserves more than being reduced to a catchy term; it demands no less than thoughtful engagement, contextual understanding, and critical analysis.