Centre for Internet and Society

Archive and Access: The Delhi State Archives

aparna — 2011-08-23T04:43:39Z

In this, the fifth entry in a series on the CIS-RAW Archive and Access project, Aparna Balachandran reports on two state archives located in Delhi, the National Archives of India, and the Delhi Archives.

Less visible than the National Archives of India is Delhi’s other state archive, the Delhi Archives. Unlike the NAI, which is located in Janpath at the heart of Lutyen’s Delhi, the Delhi Archives share a dilapidated building with the Delhi Institute of Heritage Research and Management, in a corner of the Qutub Institutional Area. The Delhi Archives were set up in 1972 to house documents and other material pertaining to the city of Delhi from as early as 1785, consisting mainly of the records of the Delhi Resident, and post 1857, the Commissioners’ Office. The collection is certainly not vast, but includes gems like the Mutiny Papers, the 600 page document on the trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar, papers on the post-rebellion demolition of Chandi Chowk and records on the setting up of Imperial Delhi.

Like the NAI, the Delhi archives are presently suffering from a lack of both funds and staff; the library, for instance, is in a state of complete disrepair. But we were assured by Sanjay Garg, who is in charge of the research room, that the archive itself is in good functioning order. The process of cataloguing its scattered Persian and Urdu records is underway, as are efforts to digitise the entire collection, about which I shall presently say more. From the very beginning, one of the important mandates for the setting up of the Delhi Archives was the acquisition of material “of interest” to Delhi (although the grounds for adjudgement seem fairly unclear) from other archival collections. We were told that records are regularly acquired from the Haryana and Punjab State Archives, and from the NAI; in addition, when funds allow, a historian is dispatched to the British Library to decide on what should be acquired from there. The Acquisitions Department also sends out a call in the papers at intervals for information about personal and family collections; sadly, we could not glean more information about this process because the person in charge was away on vacation.

In 2006, the Delhi archives launched an ambitious and much heralded project to digitise its entire collection; the process was still underway in early 2009. Documents, maps and photographs are being scanned and the visitor can access these on the two or three computers that are available for the purpose. Unfortunately, the computers are equipped with a search engine that is both difficult and cumbersome to use as well as being excruciatingly slow. This technology was developed by and borrowed from the NAI, where the online index is so ridden with misleading spellings as to make it practically unusable. Our brief use of the search engine at the Delhi Archives did not seem to throw up any glaring mistakes here at least – or perhaps we were dazzled by the visual materials now available online. Maps, the earliest going back to 1803; photographs including those of nationalist leaders; landscapes, cityscapes and monuments shot by colonial photographers; and hilariously, photos of the archive staff posing in the library stacks and offices are now all there to view with a mere click of the mouse. For a hundred rupees apiece moreover, the user can go home with the images of her choice on a pen-drive or a CD.

It is notable that the users that the Delhi State Archives and the NAI get are extremely different, a fact that impacts the way the two places function, particularly in terms of access. We were told at the research room at the NAI that the variety of users it gets has increased both in numbers and in diversity, so much so that a few years ago, archive officials decided that the category of “bonafide” user had to be expanded to include the non-academic user. Previously, access to the NAI was largely restricted to scholars armed with documentation proving their credentials; now, any citizen with some form of state identification is allowed access. While the bulk of users are still most certainly academics, the archive, or the idea of the archive, looms large in the public imagination. There are for instance, many novelists and film-makers who use the NAI. Not all are happy with their experience; some leave disappointed because the dry colonial records do not reveal, or immediately reveal the stories and detail they seek. The launching of state schemes - like the extension of martyrs pensions - that require written evidence from the archive also triggers off an increase in users. As more people and events are defined as part of, and co-opted into the National Movement, claimants to familial connections soar. We were told for example, that there was an influx of enquirers from certain villages in Haryana after a few families were able to substantiate their claims of being descendents of INA soldiers. Last year, the government agreed to grant the status of freedom fighters to the victims of the Jalliawala Bagh massacre in 1919 resulting in the arrival of those claiming to be descendents seeking evidence for the same (a complicated situation because of the vast discrepancies between the reported numbers of those killed in the British and Indian lists).

Interestingly, one case had a direct impact on the archival policy on access to documents. In the 1990s, with the increase in the number of heritage hotels in areas that included the former Princely States, claimants to land soared, with the NAI and the Home Ministry being dragged to court in several cases. As a result, the Accession Papers of the Princely States were made unviewable (a mystery was thereby solved when I repeated this information to a historian friend, frustrated that she was not allowed access to Dewas records from the '50s for some unknown reason). Interestingly, the largest category of new users consist of descendents of indentured labourers who left India in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to places like Mauritius, Jamaica, British Guiana, Trinidad and Fiji who want to trace their family histories. This is no easy task – these migrants appear in the lists that the colonial state kept of passages, medical examinations, births, deaths and marriages but were referred to by their first names only.

The profile of users at the Delhi Archives is quite different; most are non-academic and the number of scholars there could be as small as one or two a month. The non-academic user is also of a particular kind. Employees from various Delhi government departments are occasionally dispatched to the archive to refer to old files. But more importantly, the Delhi Archives are home to Delhi’s muncipal land records. A fifty to a hundred people a day arrive to look at, and make photo-copies of land records in order to settle disputes, make claims etc. The process is simple and routine and perhaps it is the fact of its being an everyday legal office that makes the Delhi Archives far simpler to access than a scholarly archive like the NAI. Entry to the NAI for instance, involves an arduous process of registration and verification; there is no such scrutiny at the Delhi Archives. Materials like border maps that are deemed as posing a threat to national security cannot be accessed at the NAI. Browsing through the maps at the Delhi Archives, we came across several border maps, a few of which we bought copies of that we can now presumably reproduce, disseminate or enlarge to hang on a wall.

We asked Sanjay Garg whether there was a policy at the Delhi to disallow the viewing of any of its records. Yes, he said, if the material was a threat to the nation’s safety. Had such a restriction ever been imposed? No, he answered.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/the-delhi-state-archives

Archives and Access: Land, Museum, Legacy

aparna — 2011-08-02T05:46:21Z

This blog entry is the third in a series of posts on Aparna Balachandran, Rochelle Pinto, and Abhijit Bhattacharya's Archives and Access project. The entry, by Rochelle Pinto, describes her visit to a museum of agricultural implements in Goa and touches upon some questions of land use and ownership in Goa and how this would be affected by public access to documents proving land rights.

I first heard about Victor Hugo Gomes’ museum of agricultural implements through a short youtube interview conducted by the journalist Frederick Noronha. The interview revealed that Victor Gomes was trained in fine arts, but had spent a large part of the last decade collecting objects which had disappeared from Goa’s contemporary agricultural practice. Behind the museologist’s talking head, I could see a range of instruments piled up on the balcony of what was obviously an old sprawling family house in Goa.

When I finally visited it, I found that Victor Hugo Gomes’ museum was unlike any other museum I had seen. For one, he had built it himself, room by room, and the sprawling house had begun to look much smaller as the museum had progressed substantially. A little away from the main gate were what looked like two covered sheds--his wet waste management unit and composting plant. ‘We don’t have a septic tank’, he began to explain, and as I didn’t specifically ask or look like I wanted to hear more, he didn’t continue. That remains a mystery that I would have liked solved, but couldn’t find polite enough words to ask. But his two units are active, converting cow dung and possibly more, into compost that goes into his organic farm that lies just beyond the fence. This museum, as its creator intended, is a space continuous with the farm, the livestock and the recycling units. It is physically separated from them by a little pathway leading to an entrance sacralised with Christian and Hindu symbols as, the artist states, is appropriate for beginnings, entrances and his collection.

There is of course, a difference between the farm and the interior of the museum. While objects on the farm and at the composting plant are in their context of use, the objects in the museum are clearly removed from their immediate contexts. Their presence inside a house, where they are objects on view, can best be explained by seeing them as a part of Victor’s stance against change in Goa. His invitation letter to a preview of the museum, close to its opening in 2008, criticises the intrusion of modern technology, and the disappearance of a way of life.

While there is much that we recognise as conventionally old, valuable, and beautiful; familiar enough criteria for something that belongs in a museum, Victor’s collection also brings other things into this category that makes us look at them anew. Ploughs, sieves, sugarcane crushers, seed sowers, and weights and measures of varying sizes, materials and kinds are arranged in an order that is still not clear on first view.

Other sites on the web, especially the evocatively written piece by Savia Viegas, suggest how the arrangement of objects crowded into this converted living space reduces the objectifying distance that a conventional museum would produce. An art historian who recommended the museum also mentioned how sensitively the objects had been restored. It is not surprising, then, to find that Gomes was trained in restoration, at INTACH in Lucknow, and returned to Goa, the place where he grew up, as curator of the museum of Christian Art to work on another project.

The enormity of the numbers of objects, and labour that must have gone into retrieving each one astounds me as the nature of Gomes’ work sinks in. We are familiar enough with cooking pots and other objects that have a more active life in the worlds of rural communities appearing in our living rooms as objets d’art, and briefly one wonders whether this is an aestheticisation of rural life. But this museum seems to side-step this problem.

The presence of these objects, not yet fully out of use (or so it would seem) in Goa, begs the question of why they had to be museumised. It is true, for instance, that cultivation has dropped drastically within Goa for a range of reasons. In some areas, it is uneconomical when the sale of land or its conversion brings higher margins. In other areas, people have been forced off the land. In yet others, irrigation patterns have been forcefully changed. And in areas where cultivation continues, it tends to be fuelled with pesticide. Yet, one can scarcely say that fishing and cultivation do not continue, particularly where there are small landholdings, using, one would think, much the same kind of technology that Gomes has in his museum. But for certain, there are precious pieces of hand-crafted agricultural technology that are impressive here, and are not in use anymore.

The wooden sugarcane crusher bound with metal for instance, was ‘rescued’ by him from Sawantwadi and restored. The texture of wood and its areas of damage are moving, as the enormous piece bears witness to labour that has vanished. A visit to some of our protected national monuments, where cracks have been filled in with visibly different materials of varying colours, would reveal, by comparison, the painstaking nature of Gomes’ work over the last decade.

When in this museum, one senses that Gomes' act of collection, and the space he has created of the museum/farm/recycling plant captures a particular sense of time. A sense of this time hovers between the living farm and waste plant outside, but is captured by the objects within. This is a time that is not yet past, not yet safely objectified in other museums, but is a world on the brink of dissolution. Appropriately enough, when Gomes speaks, it is with anger as well as with fascination for the objects and with a vehemence of purpose that has sent him travelling ‘the length and brea[d]th of our state, making [his] way to the remotest of villages’. In his own words, he has, over the last decade, made speedy dashes whenever a phone call summoned him, to buy, or receive pieces of discarded furniture, candlestands, old embroidered vestments, and the rarer of his agricultural pieces. Aside from these, there have been long stays in forested areas, ‘speaking to the village elders, capturing and documenting the ethnicity and rituals associated with every item’. But also, his collection has emerged from foraying into the attics, backyards and household dumps behind and within every home. It is from this past of disuse that Gomes has angrily summoned these implements to make them speak of a relationship to nature that is gone. The new time of his organic farm and waste plant that are demonstrations of how things can still be, is a contrast to the ironic museumised repository of objects that are not yet of the past in Goa, just the stuff of storehouses.

For this reason, Gomes recounts how he has been laughed at frequently enough by those who wondered at his mad dash out of the house to drag yet another damaged and disused object home. Laughter at non-conformity in Goa can be disabling, and the success of this musuem lies as much in what it has assembled, as in its location off the main road in Benaulim. Close enough to Margao, but decidedly not an urban location in Goa, this museum that traverses the fields of environmentalism, museology, art history, agricultural practice, and is an ongoing documentation in itself, refuses to be lined up with art academies, theatres, galleries and restaurants. Its steadfast existence in a village, housing what every village has lost, also offers hope for what these implements may one day be. It is Gomes’ hope that they do not slide further down the scale of time, from attics and storehouses, into memory and other kinds of museums.

There is another museum in Goa called ‘Ancestral Goa’, visited often by tourists, which has lifesize fibreglass figures representing rural Goans frozen in tableaux which depict, also in fibreglass, the daily life of the village. The one time I was there, accompanied by two people who spent their childhood in Goa of the 1940s and ‘50s, the ludicrousness of the exhibit was striking. Why, when most of Goa still lives in villages, was it necessary to create these distinctly badly-executed figures that were also somehow offensive, caricaturing everything that began outside the exhibit?

Gomes’ museum does not offend, and it was difficult to pinpoint why this was so. When I asked Victor whether he had seen Ancestral Goa, he seemed speechless with contempt for the cultural insult that it embodied, sanctioned by the state government. When I persisted in asking however, how he would explicitly define what distinguished him from Ancestral Goa, given that both claimed to represent Goan culture, he said that nothing in his museum was replicated or recreated, nothing needed to be explained anew, as though he were presenting an alien culture.

What makes this collection interesting to a project on internet technology and questions of archives and public access, are the last two lines of Victor’s letter of invitation to his museum, asking an unspecified ‘us’ to look at the museum communally, to suggest what journey it could take. One of these journeys is clear – there is a vast trove of information about practices relating to the land that Victor has accumulated. Even as he works at turning these into text, it is evident that it would be appropriate for someone to pick up this thread of the project that he has begun, to explore other media through which the diverse life of his museum can move. Educational curricula and other kinds of publications, both printed and online, can bring in different audiences, releasing the trove of information around each object, and making it accessible as a legacy for contemporary inhabitants of Goa. Such a development would dilute the idea of a legacy being locked within the intellectual production of a particular kind of elite in Goa’s past and could potentially tap into the knowledge base of students in non-urban locales. In fact, this museum is an explicit commitment to the children of Goa, whom Victor sees possibly growing up without any connection to what is the vital culture of their home.

There are other reasons why the appearance of this museum at this point in time is poignant. It is one response to a widespread feeling of malaise that there is something amiss in the way the land has changed, and the museum is an explicit diagnosis of the problem.

It is possible to see Victor Gomes’s museum as a single stroke against the combined perception of loss/misuse/misappropriation/misguidedness relating to the land and its resources which its people could take for granted. The fertility of the soil, the knowledge of water, the accumulated familiarity with plants, trees, festival and crop patterns are only some aspects of the many ways in which those who inhabit the land find their basic survival being wrested from them. A small part of this has to do with the voluntary sale of land in Goa – inasmuch as one can talk about the pressure of capital being a voluntary act. In retrospect, however, with an anti-outsider sentiment being voiced by different groups, it has to be acknowledged that the sale of land for profit is being retrospectively viewed with alarm as the entry of outsiders into once intact villages. While the atrocities inflicted by mining activities and SEZ regulations form one part of this, Gomes’ museum implicates Goans for their amnesiac inability to identify the loss of social cohesion as the cause for loss. His act of searching for, transporting, restoring and researching the life of each object in his museum is not only a gesture of preservation, but a stance against forgetting.

This is not without its complications. For the move for restoration of a way of life invariably leads to questions of ownership, possession, and rights that are moral, ethical and legal. If the museum embodies an aesthetic and historicising response to crisis, there are other manifestations of disquiet that force us to take these questions head on. The Goan Gaunkary Movement, with which Victor has sympathies, seeks to strengthen and assert what it sees as original forms of land ownership in Goa, the communidade or gaunkaria system, whereby land is communally administered by a hereditarily appointed group of male members representing groups of families from each neighbourhood of the village. The communidade is a functioning system today, a legal, social and cultural entity, but has seen its economic role much diminished over time. Its economic and legal role were most severely marginalised, however, with the handover of Goa to the Indian state and the introduction of the Panchayat system. Though those sympathetic to the movement, including Victor, would deny that this is a facet of the movement, it is justifiable, I think, to anticipate that were the movement to grow, it would bring into conflict castes that are seen to be dominant within the communidades, and those left out, old migrants to villages and newer ones, those who are seen to have always owned property, and those who recently bought it, etc.

A strand within this overall argument tries to emphasise the principle of natural law, embedded in Portuguese law, on which it claims the communidade system is based -- co-management rather than ownership -- for the notion of private property, according to this, is alien to natural law, which sees God as the owner of land and human beings as its caretakers. This defense, which emphasises the responsibility and duties of cultivators and gaunkars, hopes to bind all together within the notion of belonging to an original village, making agriculture a sustainable activity again, for in this lies the possibility of both a renewal of natural resources as well as a legal and political restitution of the state to a condition of self-sufficiency that the Gaunkary movement imagines is the past of Goa.

There may not be historical fact to back this, but that would be of little significance if the imagination of the movement did not ignore the fact of contemporary legal hierarchies and the sheer amount of litigation within Goa. To suspend oneself from the inherent idealism of Gomes’ project and the interesting but problematic phenomenon of the Goan Gaunkary Movement, one could see these ventures and others held within a matrix of documents of varying legality and weight as texts that impinge on the status of things.

This is predominantly an attempt to map these varying documents, their status within a world of legal battles as well as political movements that have given up on the possibilities of legality. It also inquires into what would happen at each stage, were all the documents that determine belonging, possession and ownership made publicly accessible online. What kinds of publicity does the internet make possible in relation to documents and their communities? Lastly, it maps the virtual communities of Goans, most of them diasporic, who have of late been able to tap into the concerns of contemporary Goa as far as they are represented on the internet.

It would seem that it is only in certain situations that having documents online would affect the nature of publicness and legality. The following posts will more closely track the life of documents relating to land, property in Goa and claims of belonging in Goa.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/land-museum-legacy

Archive and Access: The Archive and the Indian Historian

aparna — 2011-08-23T04:44:44Z

This post is the second in a series by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto. It comes to the question of how we can extend some of the questions and concerns that have arisen around contemporary archives to the documentary archive. It argues that the conventional understanding of the print archive as a fragile, irreplaceable national cultural legacy is a limited one and tries instead to rethink questions of ownership and access, issues thrown up in sharp relief by the digital archive.

If we could eavesdrop on informal conversations between historians on their use of state-owned archives outside of metropolitan centres, we would probably chance upon a rich trove of stories. Many of these would have to do with the tragi-comic experience of accessing, finding and handling precious material that is sure to not survive the conditions in which it is stored. The uppermost thought and feeling when working in a small archive in India, therefore, is usually an anxiety about the mortality of the document.Yet, the conditions of preservation are scarcely the only concern when we approach the question of the archive here. In fact, without embedding the archive in the many questions surrounding it, it is unlikely that issues of preservation can be broached fruitfully.
Of late, a proliferation of questions and concerns around contemporary archives has foregrounded some of the assumptions underpinning print archives.* These could be seen as a development on the perspectives that have disrupted the sanctity of the historical document in itself. The place of the archive has been assailed from many quarters, whether from the Foucauldian suspicion of the logic of the archive, or from the critiques of history that point to the divide between history and memory, public and private, or, from the subaltern perspective, between history and other ways of experiencing time.

One strand of this critique that emphasises the constructed nature of the archive, as against viewing it as a precious and accidental trace, also emphasises the variety of users and uses that open archives enable.** Archives of the contemporary that allow users to catalogue, edit, comment and add their own data pose some challenging questions to more conventional approaches to archiving.

If we could typify a ‘conventional’ approach, it would be one that sees manuscript and paper archives as a source for researchers alone, or as a pedagogic appendage, or as a national legacy, held permanently in safekeeping away from those whose psyche it is supposed to buttress. For the historian-researcher, the view of the archive as a precious and irreplaceable trace from the past is an instinctive reaction to handling an ‘original’ document. It is that instinct that makes the question of whether or not the state can and should be a repository of the archive a tortuous one. If we revisit the print archive with questions emerging from contemporary archivists, it is still difficult to detach oneself from the compelling fragility of the document. Its potential transience in fact reinforces the idea of its accidental survival from a ‘different’ time and space, and the need to restrict its handling to a careful few. The historical document in an age of mechanical reproduction threatens to remove from the historianś grasp the experience of handling the original.Yet most historians would probably agree that as a generality, taking an average archive into consideration, the state’s role in preservation could until recently be summed up as exercising tight control over disappearing documents.

Most of the conceptual questions that are implicit in the critique posed by contemporary archivists are not new to historians. However, efforts to extend this to the material existence of the archive have not had the same success, and this is where there seems to be a gap between what contemporary and non-contemporary archivists are able to do. A very different picture is conjured up by the contemporary archive with the potential access it offers to non-specialist users. The uses and needs that emerge from non-specialists cannot be imagined in the context of the state archive. Often, though this is not usually made explicit, the imagination of the contemporary archive, dislodged from the sanctity of the national, pedagogic or academic ideal, implies a digital format and the increasing possibility for the user to recategorise and signpost different aspects of a collection.

While archives of the contemporary are not necessarily celebratory, and often indicate the differential access and rights of digital publics, they nonetheless do not address those areas that the conventional historian is most familiar with.*** All of these skirt around the relatively unreachable government archives, or privately held collections. The transition from print to digital format does not ensure that issues of state ownership, access and generating potential different users for archives will be addressed. In fact the Indian historian who is the bridge between the University and the state archive can only too easily imagine continuity across the transition to another technology.

On another note, the transition to digital technology and private ownership has actually presented the historian in India with a further quandary. The digital archive in a well-funded private university setting such as can be found in the US, or in a state institution as in the UK enables holding organizations to use digital technology to ‘complete’ their archival collections, drawing in private collections from countries that cannot afford preservation and enhancing their own closed holdings. While such institutions cannot have access to Indian state archives, it is an indication that technology alone does not resolve questions that require another sort of intervention.

The question at hand:
It may be well to set aside a nationalist perspective here, for it can be argued that those forbidden by the Indian government from accessing pertinent archives are well served by the fact that these exist elsewhere. The issue here is that while currently the archives continue to be housed and controlled by national institutions, we probably cannot retain this nationalist perspective to address the question of archives anymore. Aside from being positioned between two approaches: a rapid acquisition policy with respect to private holdings, and a relatively inaccessible state policy, we could also be seen as the (illegitimate?) repository of other national holdings. For instance, the Central Library in Goa at one point in time was the holding library for Portuguese empire in the ‘East’ or the Estado da Índia. It therefore has a large collection of official government publications from Africa. Communities disaffected from the nation see their archival holdings as illegitimately if safely housed in dominant regional libraries. Each area could possibly produce varying positions vis-à-vis the nationalist perspective and not just about illegitimacy of ownership. These will be rendered untenable if one sustains a singularly nationalist perspective on the archive What is at issue is that we currently have a restricted number of print archive models at hand. The most dominant are the stateist and the knowledge economy model.

The knowledge economy model seeks to make a single repository such as a well-funded University library the single largest holding of historical material; an asset into which other Universities can buy. As an instance, we could cite the South Asia projects of the University of Chicago, which, while it makes funds available to rescue private collections from disappearance, also has a centralizing vision that converts archival collections into a private asset.**** How do we, as historians of India (and perhaps necessarily Indian historians) situate ourselves with respect to these two models?

Quite simply, we, as an assorted group of users, don’t have the resources to buy private archives, and would be opposed to (in any case untenable) state control over these. As a first move, there is a need to shift from seeing ourselves in relation to the state archives alone, or as a relatively silent entity positioned between the state and the knowledge economy, dependent on individual research grants for access overseas archives.
We could instead consider the possibilities that technology holds out to enhance control, centralization and exclusivity, or to dissipate it. We could focus on questions of access; on who potential users are; on mutually recognized open access policies between institutions, and on finding interest groups and archive-related projects and other contexts for use of the archives.

A discussion on state and private collections may have to consider different approaches and collate different kinds of information to be able to intervene in defining the possibilities of archiving. Most fundamentally, these approaches would stem from considering who the current owners – economic, ethical, political – of these archives are, and who they could possibly be, what could take and what routes of dissemination they could have?A conceptualization of a notion of commons, or public good may be a beginning point to envisage who owns the archives, who cares for them, who uses them, and how.

*By contemporary archives we refer to those housed by SARAI in Delhi or the recently launched Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive), an open access video archive that allows users to catalogue, edit, comment and add their own data.
**See for instance, Arjun Appadurai’s ‘Archive and Aspiration’
***See Lawrence Liang, ‘Global Commons, Public Space And Contemporary Ipr’
**** See the proposed Urdu Research Library Consortium into which members can buy shares.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/the-archive-and-the-indian-historian

Archives and Access: Introduction

aparna — 2015-04-24T12:05:44Z

The members of this research project team are Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore and Abhijit Bhattacharya from the Centre for the Study of Social Sciences, Calcutta. This intial post tries to outline the concerns underlining this project which will attempt to critically examine archiving practices and policies in India in order to conceptualize ideas about ownership and use towards the goal of the greatest public good; reflect on issues of digitization and access; and facilitate public conversations and the articulation of a collective voice by historians and other users on possible interventions in these institutions.

This project argues that there is a pressing need to apply the questions and concerns that have arisen around the contemporary archives – of ownership, access and use – to the historical archive. The ‘conventional’ approach sees manuscript and paper archives solely as a source for researchers, or as a pedagogic appendage, or as a national legacy, held permanently in safekeeping either by privately held collections or particularly in tightly controlled state archives. In contrast, contemporary archives (often in a digitized format) allow users to catalogue, edit, comment and add their own data and thus poses some challenging questions to a conventional approach to the archives. Again, the potential access it offers to non-specialist users interrogates the idea of archival collections meant for academic consumption alone.

This project will consider the ways to conceptualize a move away from a relationship from both the state or knowledge economy driven models of archiving. Instead it will explore the possibilities that technology holds out to enhance control, centralization and exclusivity, or to dissipate it. It will also focus on questions of access; on who potential users are; on mutually recognized open access policies between institutions, and on finding interest groups and archive-related projects and other contexts for use of the archives.

Importantly, it will also discuss the embedding of the archive within the construct of a cultural legacy. It will attempt to compare the significance of the archive to that of the painting, or sculpture or architecture and the similarities and differences that can be cited inclusive of things that are not manuscripts and texts.
Towards this end, this project will focus on three sites: it will examine the National Archives of India; as well as consider Goa and Tamil Nadu as incidental territories which enable a view of distinct issues that emerge in the interface between technology and society in the context of archiving.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/archives-and-access-introduction

Launch of Public Juris (An Online Archive of Legal Resources)

aparna — 2015-04-24T12:07:59Z

Aparna Balachandran, Rochelle Pinto, and Abhijit Bhattacharya announce the launch of Public Juris, an online archive of legal resources.

We are pleased to announce the launch of Public Juris, an online archive of legal sources and would like to elicit the active participation of the scholarly community in conceptualizing and building Public Juris as a site where we are able to provide access to material needed for law and social science research in South Asia. We would very much appreciate feedback, support and collaboration as we develop this project.

Who we are: We are two historians (Rochelle Pinto and Aparna Balachandran, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore) and an archivist (Abhijit Bhattacharya, Centre for the Study of Social Sciences, Kolkata) who are interested in issues of technology, users and access in relation to state and private archives in India (see blog).

The Project: We are soliciting contributions for an online digital archive of legal sources called “Public Juris” focusing on, but not limited to, South Asia. We hope this archive will be a useful and easily accessible resource for historians and other scholars interested in the study of different aspects of the law. We see this archive as particularly useful to students and teachers in South Asia and elsewhere who for logistical, economic or political reasons may not be able to travel to libraries and archives in order to access material of this kind. Eventually, we envisage that an online archive of this kind will allow students to broaden the thematic and regional range of their research.

How it will work: We do not have any strict definition of what constitute legal sources — they could range from acts and regulations to court cases, police records and petitions. For example, one set of records that has already been contributed to the archive centres on disputes over ceremonial privileges between the Valangi and Idangai castes in the city of Madras in the early nineteenth century. Documents that are not usually archived, such as leaflets, pamphlets, people’s enquiry reports, photographs, and advertisements, but which are critical to understanding the relationship between law and the public, can also find a space here. The material could be in any language.

As a community of scholars we are in possession of resources that can be harnessed usefully and inexpensively. All of us, for instance, have material collected from different locations that we have already used for our research or which is simply superfluous. This research could be shared. Since the archive inevitably leaves different traces for specific readings by different researchers, our research material could be put to other uses in other works. Hence, just as the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance has asked for your writings for their library, we would like to extend our request for collaborative energies within the LASS community to contribute to constructing a shared resource. Please do claim authorship of this archive by sharing with us material that you think should define and belongs in Public Juris.

Modalities: If you would like to contribute to this online archive, we request you to either bring the material with you when you attend the inaugural LASSNET conference in January, or if you prefer, send it by post to the Centre for Internet and Society (Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore, Karnataka 560052, India). We will undertake to scan the material and make it available on the Public Juris website which is in the process of being constructed and designed. We will acknowledge the contributor on the website, unless specifically asked not to do so. We will also make sure that once scanned, the material will be sent back to the contributor

If you have any questions about this initiative, please do contact aparna@cscs.res.in or rochelle@cscs.res.in. If you would like to contribute to the archive, please do contact us and let us know what kind of materials you would be willing to provide. We look forward to hearing from you.

Aparna Balachandran, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society
Rochelle Pinto, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society
Abhijit Bhattacharya, Centre for the Study of Social Sciences

In conversation with

Pratiksha Baxi, Anchor, LASS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/announcing-the-launch-of-public-juris

border map two delhi archives

aparna — 2009-04-17T06:51:07Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/MEMORANDA_2.jpg

border map delhi archives

aparna — 2009-04-17T06:49:42Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/BOOKPARTII14.jpg

marks of verification on documents issued by DAAG, Panjim

aparna — 2009-04-10T10:20:25Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/Copy%20-3-%20of%20goa08more%20660.jpg

Stamp of verification on documents issued by the Directorate of Archaeology and Archives of Goa, Panjim

aparna — 2009-04-10T10:11:23Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/goa08more%20657.jpg

Birth certificate procured from the Directorate of Archaeology and Archives of Goa, Panjim

aparna — 2009-04-10T10:08:39Z

The document provides details of names of parents, their place of origin, and their occupation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/goa08more%20655.jpg

Form of declaration assuring proper use of photocopied material from the Central Library, Panjim.

aparna — 2009-04-10T10:03:57Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/goa08more%20304.jpg

map of the baina communidade

aparna — 2009-04-10T09:42:51Z

coconut plantations of various members plotted on the map

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/Copy%20-2-%20of%20IMG-2404.JPG

communidade map

aparna — 2009-04-10T09:01:45Z

Detail of a communidade map, with Konkani terms for different sections of land.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/copyofIMG-2096.JPG

communidade map

aparna — 2009-04-10T08:48:14Z

Map with seal of state authority responsible for measurements and records, signature of presiding authority, ownership details, land use details, such as the road alongside the field, and a privately held property.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/Copy%20of%20IMG-2216.JPG

A Communidade Agricola de Aldonã

aparna — 2009-04-10T08:04:32Z

José Batista Caetano Vas A compilation of newsreports and petitions relating to the communidade dispute in Aldona Nova Goa, Typ Arthur e Viegas, 1915

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/Communidade%20Agricola.pdf