STORY PROJECT
Theme for AY 26-27
A Guide for Students and Teachers
The Central Idea
Many old objects have a history. And are connected to the history of a community or place.
Behind every artefact is a person, someone who lived through a moment of history and carried something from it.
Some objects hold grief. Some hold pride. Some hold the weight of a movement that changed a nation.
This year, your task is to find someone who is holding on to a significant, historical artefact, understand the history they lived through, and give them a voice.
What Is This Theme About?
The CAL Storytelling Theme 2026 invites you to become a story collector, a historian, and an empathetic listener. You will seek out real artefacts ( objects from the past that belong to people you know, or people you can meet) and let those objects guide you into deeply personal, historically grounded stories.
The story you write will be told in first person, in the voice of the person connected to the artefact. You are not just describing an object. You are becoming the person behind it. For this theme, each student is required to write 3 separate stories, each one built around a different artefact, a different person, and a different moment in history.
This theme is not about objects that are simply precious or old. It is about objects that carry the mark of history, objects that became important because of something that happened in the world, or shifted an entire community, not just in one family. Every artefact in your story must connect to a real historical moment, movement, or event that shaped the lives of many people, not just the person you are writing about.
Not every artefact holds a story of suffering. Some objects are kept because they carry joy – a wedding gift worn in defiance of colonial rule, a medal won by the first woman in your community to compete in public sport, a photo of the first clinic ever opened in a village by someone’s grandfather post independence. These are histories too. What matters is that the object carries historical meaning, that it opens a window into something real and significant.
What Is an Artefact?
For this theme, an artefact is not just any treasured possession. It must meet all of these conditions:
- Historically rooted: Linked to a real event or moment in history: a freedom movement, a war, a political upheaval, a labour struggle, a migration, an economic collapse, a cultural or social shift. The object must carry the mark of that history on it.
- A prized possession: Something kept with care, even when everything else was left behind or lost.
- Emotionally charged: Connected to a turning point, a sacrifice, a survival, a victory, a flourish, a dream, or a deeply held identity.
- Still meaningful today: Something the person still holds onto, and a reason why that matters.
The Test for a Strong Artefact
Ask yourself: If this object were from a different era – one with no historical upheaval, no movement, no moment of change – would it still be as meaningful?
If the answer is yes, the story may not yet have a strong enough historical connection. The artefact must carry something from the history it survived.
Key Question to Ask Yourself
If this object could speak, what story from history and human experience would it tell?
Why has this person kept it through everything that has happened?
What does this object tell us about a moment in history that shaped many lives?
What Makes a Strong Story?
A strong story for this theme will:
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- Be written in first person, as if you are the person who owns the artefact, telling your own story in your own voice.
- Be between 250 and 400 words, precise, focused, and emotionally concentrated. Every sentence must earn its place.
- Be rooted in a specific historical period or event, named and real.
- Show how the artefact became important because of what happened in history, not just in one life.
- Carry real human emotion, loss, hope, sacrifice, courage, longing, pride, grief, love, joy, wonder, defiance, etc.
- Connect the personal to the historical – one person’s experience opening a window into a bigger moment that affected a community, city, village, or nation.
- Answer the question: Why is this object still kept? What would it mean to lose it?
Minimum: 250 words | Maximum: 400 words
Within this range, every sentence should carry weight. A story of 400 words that is tightly written will be far more powerful than one that reaches the limit through padding or repetition.
The strongest stories are those where the historical moment and the personal memory are inseparable, where you cannot tell one without the other. The artefact is the meeting point between a single life and the larger sweep of history.
Photograph Requirement
For each of your three stories, you must submit one photograph taken by you showing:
- The protagonist with the artefact held, worn, or placed visibly.
📷 Why the Photograph Matters
The photograph is not just a formality. It is proof of the real human connection behind your story.
It shows that you met this person. That you sat with them. That you held or saw the object with your own hands. That the story you are telling belongs to a real person who trusted you with it.
A story without a photograph cannot be submitted for publication.
Guidelines for the photograph:
- Taken by you or with your phone or camera. It does not need to be professional
- Clear enough to see both the person’s face and the artefact
- The protagonist must have given their consent to be photographed. This is covered in the informed consent form
- One photograph per story, three photographs in total for your submission
If the protagonist does not wish to be photographed, they may hold the artefact while keeping their back to the camera, or only their hands with the artefact may be shown. Discuss this with them and respect their preference.
Illustrative Examples
The following examples describe real artefact stories and their historical connections. They are written in third person to show you the kind of story, person, and history each artefact holds. This will be your phase 1 document. At the end of this document, two of these stories are written out in full in first person so you can see what the finished piece looks and feels like.
Read each example and ask: what is the historical moment this object belongs to? What makes this story larger than one person?
| Example 1: The Film Reels (Pre-Independence India & Early Bollywood, 1930s–40s) | |
| The Story (Third Person) | An elderly filmmaker in his late eighties keeps a tin box of film reels in the corner of his room, the only record of the first film he ever made, shot in Bombay in 1943. As a young man in the late 1930s, he was among a small group of Indian filmmakers who travelled to London to learn cinematography and sound technology, because that knowledge and equipment did not yet exist in India. He returned to Bombay during the height of the Independence movement, made his film on borrowed money, but could find no distributor. No one would release a film made by an unknown Indian director about ordinary Indian life. He lost everything. He kept the reels. They are proof that he came back, that he believed, and that he tried. |
| The Artefact | Film reels of his first and only completed film, shot in Bombay, 1943. |
| What it represents | A young Indian’s journey to London to learn a technology his country did not yet possess. The belief that Indian cinema could tell Indian stories on Indian terms. The cost of trying before the industry was ready. Also, a reflection on what popular culture valued in those days. |
| Historical connection | In the 1930s-40s, Indian filmmakers travelled to Britain to learn sound and cinema technology unavailable in India. As Independence approached, a generation asked why Indian stories should be told on colonial terms. The birth of truly independent Indian cinema was tied directly to the birth of an independent India. |
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Example 2: The Box of Coins (Swadeshi Movement, Nawanagar Princely State & British Bombay, 1905–20s) |
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The Story (Third Person) |
A ten-year-old boy’s father ran a cloth shop in Calcutta selling imported British fabric. When the Swadeshi Movement swept through Bengal in 1905, the mob came for shops that had not complied with the boycott. His father stood in the doorway and refused to move. He was beaten badly and died three days later. The boy and his mother fled to Jamnagar in Kathiawar, where she had a distant cousin. Jamnagar was part of the Nawanagar princely state, which had its own currency. The boy worked there for three years, carrying loads, running errands… and saved Nawanagar coins. When he moved to Bombay at thirteen, he discovered the coins were worthless: British Bombay ran on British-issued currency and the princely state coins could not be spent or exchanged. He started again with nothing. But he kept the coins for the rest of his life as a symbol of the years after his father, the years he learned he could survive. |
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The Artefact |
A small tin box of Nawanagar princely state coins, saved by a ten-year-old boy who worked in Jamnagar after his father was killed in the Swadeshi Movement violence. |
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What it represents |
A father killed in the crossfire of a political movement he did not choose. A child’s years of solitary survival. Coins that became worthless the moment he crossed into British Bombay — and priceless as the symbol of everything he had endured. |
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Historical connection |
The Swadeshi Movement (1905-08) called for a boycott of British goods, but also brought violence against traders who did not comply. Pre-Independence India was a patchwork of jurisdictions: British India and hundreds of princely states each with their own coinage. The Nawanagar coins became worthless the moment the boy entered British Bombay, a reminder that India was not one country, and that ordinary people were caught between all of them. |
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Example 3: The Khadi Sari (Gandhi’s Khadi Movement, 1920s–30s) |
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The Story (Third Person) |
In 1931, a nineteen-year-old woman chose to wear a rough handspun khadi cotton sari on her wedding day, not the silk that every bride in her family had worn before her. The women in the neighbourhood said she looked poor. Her husband said she looked like India. Gandhiji had been calling on women across the country to give up imported and mill-made cloth and wear khadi as an act of political commitment. She believed him. She wore the khadi sari on her wedding day as a statement that a wedding could carry the weight of a nation’s dignity. She kept the sari for the rest of her life, never wearing it again, but taking it out sometimes to hold. She said: I wore this the day I became a woman and the day I chose what kind of Indian I wanted to be. |
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The Artefact |
A handspun khadi cotton sari, worn on the wedding day in 1931. |
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What it represents |
A young woman’s act of political commitment on the most personal day of her life. The belief that cloth could carry a nation’s dignity. A statement made once and kept folded in a trunk for a lifetime. |
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Historical connection |
Gandhi launched the Khadi Movement in the 1920s as part of the Non-Cooperation Movement, calling on Indians to reject British mill-made cloth. He specifically appealed to women to lead this return to hand-spinning and hand-weaving. Wearing khadi at a wedding, where fine fabric was expected, was a radical and visible act of resistance. |
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Example 4: The Violin (Sri Lankan Civil War, 1983–2009) |
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The Story (Third Person) |
A boy grows up in Jaffna in a household where music is the first language. His father plays the violin, not professionally, but as naturally as breathing. Every evening, the boy sits beside his father and learns. In 1987, his father arrives at school to collect him and says: we are leaving today. They can carry only what they can hold. The boy goes back into the house once and picks up the violin. They never return. His father is killed two years later trying to cross a checkpoint. The boy grows up in London, then Canada, then India. He carries the violin through all of it. Decades later, he cannot play without weeping. But he plays every week. When I play, he says, my father is still teaching me. When I stop, he is gone. |
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The Artefact |
The violin his father taught him on, carried out of Jaffna the day they fled. |
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What it represents |
A father’s love and their shared language of music. A home and a life that no longer exist. The way an object can hold a person who is no longer alive. |
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Historical connection |
The Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009) displaced hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians, shattering one of South Asia’s most accomplished communities. Families fled overnight with what they could carry. The diaspora scattered Tamil culture across the world. This violin is one version of what that displacement looked like not as a statistic, but as a carried object. |
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Example 5: The Torn Work Gloves (The Great Bombay Textile Mill Strike, 1982) |
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The Story (Third Person) |
A mill worker starts at a Parel textile mill in 1965 at the age of nineteen. He works the same machine for seventeen years. In January 1982, Datta Samant calls the strike. Two hundred and fifty thousand workers walk out together. The worker believes it will last weeks. It lasts eighteen months. There are no wages. His wife sells her jewellery. His children leave school. The family eats what the neighbourhood can spare. The strike breaks in 1983 without a single concession. The mills never reopen. The owners close permanently, sell the land, and walk away. The mill lands become some of the most valuable real estate in India. The working-class neighbourhoods of Parel and Girangaon — built over a century around the mills — are demolished. He keeps the last pair of torn work gloves from his final shift. They are the only proof he was ever there. |
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The Artefact |
A pair of torn cotton work gloves from the Parel textile mills — the last pair worn before the 1982 strike that closed the mills forever. |
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What it represents |
Seventeen years of labour. The dignity of a working life and the community built around it. The betrayal of the strike — no wages, no concessions, no mills. The proof that he was there, that it was real, and that it mattered. |
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Historical connection |
The Great Bombay Textile Mill Strike began on 18 January 1982 under trade union leader Datta Samant, involving nearly 250,000 workers from over 65 mills. The government declared it illegal and refused negotiation. After eighteen months — one of the longest industrial strikes in Indian history — the strike collapsed without a single concession. Over 80 mills closed permanently, leaving 150,000 workers unemployed. The mill lands became prime real estate. The city shifted from industrial to financial. Datta Samant was assassinated in January 1997. |
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Example 6: The Wedding Photograph (Partition of India, 1946–47) |
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The Story (Third Person) |
A woman keeps a single photograph on her dressing table — her wedding picture, taken in Lahore in October 1946, eleven months before Partition. She is laughing in it. It is the last photograph taken in the drawing room of the house where she grew up — the house her grandfather built, where her father was born, where she and her sisters played. When Partition came in August 1947, the family crossed the border with what they could carry on their bodies. The house was left. Everything in it was left. She brought the photograph rolled in her sleeve. She kept it because she needed proof: that the house existed, that they were happy in it, that before the world was divided there was a room where a young woman laughed on the day she was married. |
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The Artefact |
A wedding photograph, taken in Lahore, October 1946. |
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What it represents |
A life that existed before the world was cut in two. The happiness that was real before the catastrophe. A house, a city, a family — and the photograph as the only remaining proof. |
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Historical connection |
The Partition of India in August 1947 resulted in one of the largest and most violent forced migrations in human history — an estimated 10–20 million people displaced, up to two million killed. Lahore became part of Pakistan overnight. Hindu and Sikh families who had lived there for generations left behind everything they could not carry. This photograph holds that history in a laughing face. |
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Example 7: The Tailor’s Illustrated Guide Book (Gulf Migration & Post-Independence Craftsmanship, 1960s–80s) |
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The Story (Third Person) |
A grandchild finds their grandfather’s illustrated tailoring guide book after his death. He was trained under a master tailor in Bombay in the 1950s, in the years after Independence when Indian craftsmanship felt like something to be proud of. He was good enough to be brought to the Gulf in the late 1960s — to Bahrain, then Oman — to sew for patrons who valued a hand-stitched seam. In the guide book, the grandchild finds his handwriting in every margin: corrections to the diagrams, notes on fabric and climate, sketches of cuts he had invented himself. And on the inside front cover, in careful Gujarati: an address in Bahrain. Nobody in the family had ever mentioned Bahrain. He had spent years there that the family had forgotten — or never knew — or chose not to speak of. The book held a life that had been folded away. |
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The Artefact |
An illustrated tailoring guide book, filled with the grandfather’s handwritten notes, sketches, and a Bahrain address no one in the family knew about. |
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What it represents |
The gap between what a family remembers and what was actually lived. A craftsman’s pride — visible in every marginal correction. The silence of migration: the years abroad that were never spoken of, the life that existed outside the family’s knowledge. |
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Historical connection |
After Independence, a generation of skilled Indian craftsmen became part of the large wave of South Asian labour migration to the Gulf from the 1960s onwards, as the oil economy created enormous demand. These men spent years in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the UAE, sending money home and returning changed. Their individual lives were rarely recorded. This guide book is one such record: a private archive of a working life lived far from home. |
What Kind of Artefacts Can You Use?
Artefacts can take many forms. What matters is not the object itself, it is the historical story it carries. Every artefact you choose must have a clear connection to a real historical moment or movement.
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Object |
The Kind of History It Might Carry (These are ONLY EXAMPLES. You do not have to limit yourself to these.) |
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Old photographs or letters |
Partition, displacement, war, cultural movements, or a life that existed before the world changed. |
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Musical instruments |
Migration, conflict, the loss of a culture or tradition, or the survival of one. |
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Handspun or handwoven clothing |
Gandhi’s Khadi Movement, the Swadeshi boycott, the politics of what you wear. |
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Coins or currency |
Colonial-era princely state coinage, the patchwork of currencies across pre-Independence India, glimpses of trade, value of money and the disappearance of certain coins. |
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Tools, gloves, or work objects |
A life of industrial labour, a strike that changed a city, a trade passed down or destroyed by history. |
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Film reels, recordings |
The birth of Indian cinema, Indians going abroad to learn what their country did not yet know. |
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Diaries or notebooks |
Private voices surviving public catastrophe, a craftsman’s marginal notes, a migrant’s secret address. |
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Keys, trunks, boxes |
A home left behind at partition or forced migration, a life packed and carried across a border. |
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Documents or ration cards |
Displacement, refugee status, the bureaucracy of survival after catastrophe. |
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Clothing or jewellery |
A khadi sari worn in political defiance, a wedding outfit that carries the weight of a movement. |
Step-by-Step: How to Write Your 3 Stories
- Find your 3 artefacts and the people behind them.
Talk to grandparents, neighbours, and elders in your community. Ask them about something old they still keep, and why. Do not settle for the first object they mention. Ask: is there something connected to a moment in history? Something connected to a movement, a war, a strike, a migration, a change in the country, a significant shift in culture or politics? Each of your three stories must come from a different person, a different artefact, and a different historical moment.
- Take your photograph.
Before you leave the meeting with your protagonist, take a photograph. Make sure the artefact is clearly visible. Make sure you have their consent. This photograph is a required part of your submission.
- Understand the history behind it.
Before you write a single word, you must understand what was happening in the world when this object became important. Research the historical event or movement your artefact connects to. Know what it meant for ordinary people, not just the leaders and famous names, but for ordinary families, workers, children, citizens.
- Step into their voice.
Write in first person – as if you are that person. Let the artefact lead the story. Let the reader feel the historical moment through one person’s body and voice.
- Show, don’t just tell.
Use specific detail: What did the artefact look, feel, smell like? What was happening around them? The historical event must be felt, not just explained. Make the reader live the moment.
- Keep it tight: 250 to 400 words.
Within this range, make every sentence carry weight.
A Note for Teachers
This theme works best when students are given the time to find real stories. Encourage them to speak to elders —- family members, neighbours, community figures – and to treat those conversations with genuine curiosity and care.
The best stories will come from real connections. A student who sits with their grandmother and listens for an hour will write something far more powerful than one who invents an artefact or borrows someone else’s story.
It is important to emphasise that the historical connection must be strong and specific. An object that is simply old or precious is not enough. The artefact must carry a historical event or movement inside it. Help students ask: When did this object become important? What was happening in the country, the city, the community at that time?
Remind students of the photograph requirement. It must be taken during the meeting with the protagonist, with the artefact visible and the protagonist’s consent given. This photograph is a required part of the submission, not an optional extra.
Remind students of the word count: 250 to 400 words. Encourage them to start at the most powerful moment, not at the beginning of the story. The discipline of the word limit is part of the craft.
| History is not only in books.
It lives in people, in memories, and in the things they choose to hold on to. Some of those things are kept through tears. Some are kept through pride. All of them carry history. |
EXEMPLAR STORIES
Two First-Person Narratives ( 250 to 400 Words Each)
How to Read These Exemplars
The following two stories are written in first person — in the voice of the person who owns the artefact. Both are between 250 and 400 words. Read them to understand what the finished piece should feel like: how the historical context is woven in naturally, how the artefact carries the weight of the story, and how the ending brings both the personal and the historical together.
Notice that neither story explains history from the outside. The history is felt through the character’s own experience, through what they saw, carried, lost, and kept.
Exemplar 1: The Khadi Sari – Gandhi’s Khadi Movement, 1931 • 326 words
Written in first person, in the voice of the person who owns the artefact.
The morning of my wedding, my mother held out the silk sari she had saved for three years. Pale gold, heavy, the kind of fabric that announces itself when you walk into a room. Every bride in our family had worn something like it. It was expected.
I said no.
I had been spinning for two years by then. Every morning before school, sitting at the charkha, pulling the cotton into thread. Gandhiji had asked us — all of us, but the women especially — to give up the mill cloth, the imported fabric from Manchester that kept our own weavers without work. He had asked us to spin, to weave, to wear what our own hands made. I believed him. I still believe him.
I wore the khadi sari. Rough, off-white, handspun. My mother wept. Not from grief — something harder to name. The women in the lane said I looked like a widow. A few said nothing at all, which was worse. My husband looked at me across the ceremony and said, very quietly: you look like India.
I have kept the sari. It sits folded in the bottom of my trunk, wrapped in the same cloth I placed it in on the evening after the wedding. I have never worn it again. But I take it out sometimes. I run my hand across it and I remember what it felt like to make a choice that small and that enormous at the same time.
People ask me why I keep it. They say the Independence movement is over. They say we won. They say it is just an old piece of cloth now.
But that is not what it is. It is the day I was nineteen years old and I decided, in the only way available to me, what kind of Indian I was going to be. The silk is still in my mother’s trunk. I left it there. I have never once regretted it.
Exemplar 2: The Torn Work Gloves – The Great Bombay Textile Mill Strike, 1982 • 339 words
Written in first person, in the voice of the person who owns the artefact.
I started at the mill in 1965. Nineteen years old. The looms ran day and night in those days — two shifts, sometimes three. The noise was so deep you stopped hearing it after a week. It became the sound of normal. All of Parel ran on that sound.
I worked the same machine for seventeen years. I wore through dozens of pairs of gloves — thin cotton ones, issued every few weeks, gone at the fingertips by the end of the month. The last pair I kept. I cannot tell you exactly why. I just put them in my bag the morning we walked out and never threw them away.
January 18th, 1982. We went on strike. Two hundred and fifty thousand of us, all the mills together, behind Datta Samant. We stood at the gates and we believed it would be weeks. Months at most. The owners would come to the table. They always had.
They did not come to the table. The months passed. A year passed. My wife sold her gold bangles in March. My son stopped going to school in September because I could not pay the fees. We ate what the neighbours shared. We held. We believed.
The strike collapsed in 1983. No wages recovered. No demands met. Nothing. The owners had been waiting for exactly this — a reason to close, to take the land, to be rid of us entirely. The mills shut one by one. They sold the plots. The chawls came down. Glass towers went up where the weaving floors used to be.
One hundred and fifty thousand of us. Nowhere to go.
I kept the gloves. They are torn at all five fingertips of the right hand. The left is worse. Seventeen years of the same machine, every working day.
The mill is gone. The neighbourhood is gone. Datta Samant was shot dead in 1997, in his own car, outside his own building. Nobody was ever convicted.
But I have the gloves. And they remember, even if no one else does.