The story of how India leveraged the mighty elephant in the post-World War era to strengthen its diplomacy, or what Nazi propaganda was like in India, or how a Bhopal-born Pakistani man was instrumental in Argentina’s first World Cup victory.
Stories like these aren’t normally found in history textbooks. But they are part of a rich, quirky, and jaw-droppingly incredible repository of India’s recent past. They are scattered all over – in family memories, old letters, granmothers’ tales, and oral histories. And sometimes in old newspapers. Now there is a one-stop shop for such stories.
ThePaperclip is the latest hot storyteller in town that can fill the void left by a loving grandparent telling stories that breathe life into history, making the world seem grand and warm. It’s a blog of history, sports, and culture that has taken it upon itself to find and share the map to these long-lost treasures and backstories.
Founded on 15 August 2021 by Indranath Mukherjee, Trinanjan Chakraborty, and Sriwantu Dey, the website brings us “binding” stories, hence the name “Paperclip,” which binds papers rich with stories of all kinds together.
The website offers stories of culture, history and sports. The beauty of the page lies in the rarity of the literature they unearth. It’s written in a language that elevates history from an account of things to tales of time. And it’s all done by a team not comprising history experts, researchers, or academicians but just a bunch of like-minded people with a shared passion for contemporary history.
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Meet the team
Paperclip is sort of a second inning of Goaldentimes.org, an award-winning blog that has archived the history of football, adding to the sport’s legend. Goalden Times was launched in 2011 by Srinwantu Dey and Indranath Mukherjee. Both Dey and Mukherjee come from corporate backgrounds with a shared interest in storytelling. The website had a very niche audience; the team felt they had reached saturation, and the project had to be shut down during the pandemic.
But Dey and Mukherjee weren’t ready to call time. They started planning something more ambitious, beyond the goal posts of football. They got in touch with Trinanjan Chakraborty, a passionate storyteller and author of Forgotten Sons: Untold Stories of Indian Cricket. He was the perfect fit for the job. Dey and Mukherjee had met Chakraborty at a charity football match organised by Goalden Times in 2019.
Although the three are from Kolkata, they found each other on social media and were brought together by mutual interest.
The website’s strongest presence is on Twitter with more than 46,000 followers. Their threads perform impressively, with each getting thousands of retweets and comments. Some even find themselves on the microblogging site just to read what Paperclip has to say. The page is slowly taking the place of anyone’s favourite newspaper column.
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Finding stories in history
Together, Dey, Mukherjee, and Chakraborty envisioned a platform that would present history to its readers in the most non-subjective way possible. They wanted to tell off-beat, non-mainstream stories that “could surprise and delight people.” That was uncommon.
“Stories not of the most common people, but the ones that had an impact on the larger history or an obscure aspect of a well-known person or event,” as Trinanjan Chakraborty puts it, but also battling “yellow journalism” and the distortion of history in the post truth era.
“Currently there’s a conscious effort of rewriting history. Nobody was interested in telling historical stories as they are. So, we wanted to narrate it in the most factual, but readable way possible. We’re proud storytellers,” said Indranath Mukherjee, adding that they wanted to tell stories that made people pause and reflect. “Stories that could spark conversations.”
The first story was heavier than many of those that appeared later. It documented a riot at a football match in Eden Gardens and tracked people who had attended the match to get first-person accounts for the story.
The website was launched in 2021, but the trio had started brainstorming almost 12 months ago, in August 2020, in the thick of a nationwide lockdown. They do a good job of selecting topical stories, for example, during the Olympics or Wimbledon games, they published delightful stories with an Indian connection.
The stories are so arcane that even experts of the field find themselves in surprise at finding a new page in history. “We did a detailed story around open prisons that inspired the movie Do Aankhen Barah Haath (1957). Sudhir Mishra, renowned filmmaker who had worked with the director of the film, V Shantaram, for a number of years said he never knew its backstory. Similarly, the best Gandhian scholar in India, Ramachandra Guha, read this same story and discovered a Shantaram angle, and remarked even though he didn’t know that aspect of Gandhian history! These are all validations that tell us what we’re doing is worth it,” Mukherjee said.
He added that the work stumps not only common people but also domain experts. Guha is a regular reader, says Mukherjee, and whenever he retweets, more and more people discover The Paperclip.
The accounts are so powerful that they’ve even reunited long-lost cousins.
In a profile where they wrote about Leela Row Dayal, who is a legendary tennis champion, two long-lost cousins were reunited. They were her grandnephews.
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Not a news portal
The website currently in collaboration with Wikimedia is self-funded by the trio. They want to be unpredictable, conversational, and consumable. But they insist they’re not journalists, historians, or academicians. “We’re not finding new things. We’re just presenting facts already documented in a consumable way,” Dey said.
With its research, interviews, and sourcing, Paperclip sounds like a niche journalism portal bringing stories from the past, but the team doesn’t want to be called journalists because most are neither from a media background nor do they cover or comment on current events. “We don’t report news. We’re storytellers,” Mukherjee said.
Apart from the three, there is a team of seven more people who work remotely. “The first step was to build the brand, and then raise money for marketing,” Dey said.
The website is currently in conversation to raise funding to increase the scale of the project, but they couldn’t divulge further details. Paperclip has leveraged Twitter for reach.
Their presence on other social media is not that strong because the team believes its content has more readers on Twitter. “From researchers to journalists to academicians, the people we wanted to reach and believed would be interested in our content are on Twitter. So, it was our priority platform. Instagram is more of lifestyle and blogging, but we’re planning to develop videos that could perform well on the platform,” Dey said.
While they want to battle “yellow journalism” and provide authentic historical accounts when distortion is the norm, the website provides fairly non-political stories. “We don’t want to go for political stories and then create an echo chamber of our own. Just by bringing truth to the fore, we defeat the lies,” Dey added.
(Edited by Tarannum)