The Delhi State 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.

The Inalienable Right to the Archives – Entering the Capital

Though one approaches all state archives with apprehension about possible obstacles in the way of research, it would be a mistake to think that all have the same self-perception or anxieties as the Delhi-based National Archives of India. The NAI, one of the largest repositories of colonial and post-independence records, is overseen by the Ministry of Culture, but also, by default, by the Home Ministry. Since it is the repository of ‘non-current  records’, the NAI becomes the recipient of de-classified documents and receives directives from time to time from the Home Ministry regarding restrictions to be placed on public viewing of documents.

This fact generates an over-hanging awareness of potential reprimands and memos that could issue from these Ministries, asking for explanations for why certain documents were released. A direct result of this is the pro-active censorship of materials such as maps of disputed territories or documents that ‘may incite communal disharmony’ by the archival staff themselves. One member of the staff, for instance, disallowed the reproduction of a map of the Tibetan region on the grounds that it would ‘jeopardise the geo-political interests of the country’, and recounts how he was responsible for withholding certain documents that were asked for in the Emergency period, that would have impacted the then office of the leader of the opposition, Charan Singh.

The NAI thus sees itself as closely wedded to the state and as a responsible guardian of potentially impactful documents that would have dire consequences in the wrong hands. No other state archive quite sees itself as the official concealer of the state’s dirty linen, and the Delhi archive, in that sense, is the apex institution in the degree to which it alone manifests emotions displayed typically by state archives across the country: secrecy, responsibility, control, paternalism, righteousness as the arbiter of access.

This is in direct contrast to the functioning and world view of many of the archivists, who in fact declare that the archives are technically open to all citizens, and are a public repository. This legal fact is predictably enough mediated through other legal qualifications about sensitivity and interests of the nation, and looped through a relay of permissions solicited from various authorities. A search for a conspiracy of concealment would draw a blank in most state archives. What works is a sort of relay of apprehensiveness and bureaucratic lag, with most staff looking over their shoulders to watch who sees them hand over any document from a list of publications available in their bookshop, to a list of documents acquired from the British Library through official exchange agreements. Save those who are higher up in the hierarchy and more secure in their positions, acquiring information could necessitate an RTI application purely to surmount the anxiety generated by informal questioning.

Archivists themselves are aware of this. They point to the fact that the maximum difficulty is encountered at the gate, where it can take a full half-hour or more to get past the security, get a daily pass issued, etc. Senior members of at least two prestigious archives in the capital pointed to the security guard’s authority at the gate as being the biggest hurdle to accessing the archives. Some point to the ‘caution exercised by the hatchet’ at the Ministry level, even before documents arrive in the public domain.

Pramod Mehra, the Assistant Director of the Archives indicates that little has changed since 1923 in the form of record-keeping, a consciousness brought in by the colonial government. The strife over public access can be recounted from the time of the colonial government with differing views exercised by changing governor-generals. The archives, he states, function as a mediator between the creating agency such as the Ministries, and scholars. But, he insists, all who carry bona fide documents proving their identity as citizens have an inalienable right to enter the archives.

Technically therefore, there seem to be sufficient spaces for intervention by users, and in fact, as the earlier post states, the increase in the number and kind of users has in itself forced an expansion in the categories of users permitted. It would appear that this is the trend everywhere. Where archival records accidentally have non-historical functions, as in the Delhi Archives, the archive alters eventually to accommodate users and it would seem that generating such users and uses is the easier way to pragmatise the question of access.

The other mechanism is to find hooks within the system through which to enable access. Take the case of the Central Secretariat Library which is housed within the Secretariat complex in New Delhi. The Library sees itself as a repository of government records and documents, open to government employees by right, for any research they may want to conduct. As a transition from the colonial period, this library stores official documents that pertain to the past of the current state. Since the library views itself as open to the public for generalised reading, there is not much anxiety over making older books and documents available. A student working on the North East, for instance, will find it cumbersome to enter the National Archives and to access maps of the region which may be far more easily traced in the Central Secretariat Library.

What is of even greater interest is that this is the library that holds any document acquired by a foreign entity in collaboration with a state institution. So, for instance, the online Digital South Asia Library, a consortium that is housed by the University of Chicago website, collected a range of literary works in Indian languages based on the compilations of a national librarian. A copy of this collection lies with the Central Secretariat, as do microfilms that have been received as part of an exchange programme with the British Library. The current director of this Library appears only too willing to encourage collaborations from historians towards the cataloguing of these collections, which once again are closed to the public merely because adequate cataloguing procedures are not in place. In an interview that appeared to open doors, he insisted that generating public pressure around the significance of the collection would work as a persuasive force, as evidence that the funds allocated for digitisation or preservation are in fact needed, and that an audience exists for such material.

It seems as though appealing to abstract principles of access, citizenship and rights calls forth nameless and immovable blocking mechanisms inbuilt in the state, whereas tinkering with minor functions that do not invoke its broader raison d’être allows one to enter unnoticed.

Documents in the Time of Democracy

Contemporary conflict over land brings together issues of land ownership, legal documents and technology in ways that make us examine the circulation and political significance of documents and information. If we assess the relevance of documents as evidence or as verifiers of truth in the midst of political battles over land, we are led to doubt the apparently inherent democratic promise of digital technology. Even where internet technology is accessible, for instance in the modernised villages of Goa, our belief that public access to official documents through the internet is a democratic gesture can be questioned. It would appear that this form of circulation or display need not have great political significance for contemporary movements, let alone the question of whether it has the potential to function as a politically liberating force. This implies that while there is a fulfilment of democracy in a technical sense, the political significance of a particular document and of the public domain in which it circulates can only be gauged from the way in which a dispute over land or over ownership of property, or about membership within a village, foregrounds one kind of document over another and constructs different kinds of public. In the case of current disputes in Goa around land that is, or was held by village level communidades or gaunkarias, there is not even a stable or singular legal meaning attached to the range of documents that circulate among the competing authorities and parties to these disputes. In fact, tracing the life and path of the different legal documents that are necessary to argue a case involving communidade land involves a tangle of authorities, repositories and disputing groups. The sense of publicness that is raised by internet technology requires us to question the kind of politics that endows the document and its publicness with political meaning.

In a national and possibly international situation where anti-state claims on land are often non-legal (whether in the form of ethical arguments or armed rebellion) the current conflicts over land in Goa are local in the sense of having specific attributes. Special Economic Zones (as also other prior forms of transnational economic flows) propagate a  delinking of life, labour, and capital from any fixed political entity, in as far as they claim immunity from national laws. Against this, the diverse claims on land in Goa (whether as familial disputes, environmental conflicts, livelihood arguments, belongingness and historical claims of being indigenous), raise overlapping claims and arguments about the relation between legality and politics, the use of internet technology within resistance movements and rights over land that are outside the domain of private property. All of these resonate with similar conflicts ongoing in other parts of the country, with some differences in the kinds of opposition generated.

The overall thrust of the argument made here is that movements that are pitted against the state or the multinational entities it supports straddle various forms of state power. Currently, we tend to see these divided into the formal exercise of power through law, regulation, and systematization, and the exercise of power through non-legal and non-state entities and means. The widely perceived illegitimacy of the state requires it to engage in two forms of political representation – the one consolidating its use of governmentality through law, the other effecting its sovereignty through a substantive exercise and demonstration of power. The appearance of legality and the lacing through of all political processes with due procedure and due documents is important to sustain some measure of governmentality, while the domain of substantive politics requires that rule be maintained through overt coercion and expropriation. The two domains are not disconnected. The ability to amend laws by an act of government, without due discussion or consensus gives the state infinite licence to bolster its acts of violence with legality. The gap between these two domains provides an element of unpredictability and turbulence that generates the frisson of excitement for viewers (as against the sufferers) of Indian state politics. For, the sheer existence of forms of governmentality implies that those equipped to do so will demand the fulfillment of the liberal project that the state claims to be bound by. The Right to Information movement and the innumerable human rights reports and people’s courts are instances of the state being called to order within its own terms. If these calls threaten to jeopardise interests beyond a certain threshold, then substantive violence is enacted, more often than not exceeding the bounds of legality. Those who oppose the state but whose opposition is articulated within the terms of governmentality find themselves condemned to demanding justice or the restitution of truth over decades.  The success of the state however lies in its ability to negotiate both these forms of power, allowing it to insert itself into dominant global currents in politics and economy, while keeping its house in order at home. This gap and its bridging is made visible through a range of events, patterns and pronouncements. The unstable status of the document as the locus of truth and evidence, in the context of legal and political conflicts reveals this gap. Differing forms of punishment and justice are not the only markers of ill-fitting forms of power. Ethically admissible claims that are not based on rights, made by non-state entities that have no legal recognition are also caught on the side of all that lies outside the domain of modern statecraft. Internet technologies that work to make what was hitherto hidden or inaccessible more ‘public’ are necessarily inscribed within this network of quasi-legal, legitimate, illegal and illegitimate entities and practices.The working of technology then has to be understood through the idea of governmentality as a language of control and subversion. This is further qualified by the fact that the discourse around writing and regulation has always been viewed with suspicion by those who stand outside its circle of power.

Digitisation and Private Records–The Case of the Regional Archive

One of the less known functions of state archives in India is the periodic acquisition of records from the general public at regular intervals. These are in the form of voluntary contributions that are solicited through advertisements for particular kinds of private collections, depending on the nature of the archive and what its administrators think is a useful and appropriate addition to it. On our visit to the Delhi Archives we were explicitly informed that this was a place for collections or documents pertinent to the interests of the Delhi Archives, but the Delhi Archives were emphatically not interested in what was of ‘national significance’. Materials of the latter kind, we were told, were to be given to the National Archives of India. Unfortunately since the person in charge of the acquisition of manuscripts was away, we were not be able to obtain more information about how contributions are determined to be of importance to the Delhi archive or not and the process by which they are obtained, or see a list of what in fact had been obtained in this way over the years.

The Delhi Archives appear to function quite autonomously as far as the acquisition of records of this kind is concerned; the TNA on the other hand works through one of the Regional Committees for the Survey of Historical Records. These Committees, whose members include the Assistant Commissioners and Collectors of District Record Offices in different parts of the country, are the decision makers as far as private records are concerned; a registry of these records is maintained at the National Archives. According to the Citizen’s Charter of the TNA, the Committee’s aim is to ‘to survey and collect the rare records of historical administrative, legal and fiscal value in the hands of private persons to strengthen the history of India and to bring to light such records… to preserve them for posterity’. These records have to specifically pertain to the period before 1947; examples of contributions that would be welcome include ‘palm leaves, copper plates, letters of high dignitaries, deeds, correspondence volumes, books, journals, etc., relating to the freedom movement, photos, any assignment of lands to the East India Company, or the British, religious customs, endowment of property to any charitable purpose, deed of Zamins, Polygars, Newabs, Samasthanams, Rajas, any notable events in the British Rule, etc’.

The acquisition of materials of this kind at the TNA ceased at least twenty years ago. The TNA does keep a list of these materials, and after some pleading, I was able to take a look at it (although the names of many of the contributors are now missing).  They include for instance, the Pudukottai Residency records; various zamindari records including for instance, Sengampatti and Ramnad; Portuguese documents (Regimento Auditorio; Ecclesiastico de Archbispado Primacial de Goa Eda Sua Relocao Anno 1810); a collection of papers relating to the late Chief Minister and film actor MG Ramachandran (MGR); autographs and photos of nationalist leaders as well as sundry Hindi and Persian documents. The person in charge of these records explained that the criterion for accepting contributions was above all, their age. He mentioned the fact that many a contributor was turned away when they had collections pertaining to the post Independence period (the MGR papers being, of course, an exception to this rule). The issue of regional relevance that was emphasised in the Delhi Archives was not brought up here at all. It is interesting that after the linguistic re-organisation of South India, there was an attempt, following an assumed political and linguistic logic, to separate and distribute the holdings of the TNA to Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. This logic does not extend to the private holdings which are required to be of national rather than regional significance.

One problem that clearly surfaced in the course of my looking at the acquisition of private records by the TNA is the lack of any sort of formal legal arrangement between the families that possess collections and the institutions who wish to acquire them. This is particularly important because these collections often possess sentimental or other kinds of value for the families, which have to be acknowledged and respected even as they become part of public repository. The issue of digitisation also throws up various points. At a very basic level is the issue of conservation. While the TNA is digitising its holdings, private records are left untouched. It is unclear why this is the case; in all likelihood, it is because they are not considered a part of the TNA’s holdings. The archive is merely their guardian (this for instance is also true of land records which do not fall under the digitisation scheme because the TNA is merely “housing” these documents for the government). Given the eclectic nature and often geographically and linguistically diverse range of the private records at the TNA (and other regional archives), there is no doubt that users of archives would benefit greatly from online catalogues of these collections. And finally, while the official British themselves occupy little space in the public imagination of Madras, the range of private records the TNA possesses might well attract new users, both scholarly and lay, to the colonial archive.

Note on Survey and Procurement of Indian Language Materials, Shahid Amin

Note by Professor Shahid Amin, On Document and Vernacular Tracts Survey in India and Abroad and Procurement from Repositories Outside India, 10th December 2004, Expert Committee, Ministry of Culture.

( for the whole note, please contact the blog authors)

Pilot Project for Identifying Small Institutions/Individuals in India which/ who have material, especially in Indian languages

(1) The aim is

(a) to develop a National Register over the next three years, ie by the end of 2007, providing a comprehensive listing of all the material on social, cultural, literary, and political and economic conditions of our peoples in the various languages and dialects of India, with special reference to the colonial period.

(b) to make provisions for their digitizing for safe usage by future generations of scholars and experts, with a view to strengthening and democratizing the base of Indian scholarship on the development of our heritage in an historical perspective.

(c) Making rare but esssential products of Indian creativity, literary and social scientific and humanistic of the colonial period easily accessible in digitized form to scholars within India is an essential precondition for lessening the “source material divide” that hobbles scholarly and creative efforts by Indian scholars. It is also to enable the younger generation of our researchers who can ill afford to make expensive research trips to UK and USA, where a lot of this material is readily accessible for extended consultation by academics and experts.

(d) to  have alongside a complete listing of all such material, either in original or on microfilm, in repositories abroad eg, in the British Library ( OIOC), SOAS, Museum of Mankind, PRO, Asiatic Society, Imperial War Museum ( all in London), and in Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, Manchester etc, and in libraries and institutions with specialized holdings on India in the USA and other countries, This would help us procure digitized copies of such material from these repositories, with a view to cllect the holdings of items either no longer extant in India, or in brittle and unusable condition.

(e) Further, to supplement the creation of a National and a World Register of such material in the various Indian languages and dialects, with the identification and microfilming ( and digitization) of material collected by colonial officials and ethnographers in the 19th and 20th centuries in the culture, beliefs, practices, lore, narratives, histories of the various groups and communities in the several cultural and linguistic zones of India.

(f) As a first step in this direction, the Pilot Project shall concentrate on the microfilming and digitization, on a priority basis of the entire set of papers and documents which form a part of the following major collections in the UK: G.A. Grierson Papers, H.M. Elliot Papers, William Crooke Papers, Buchanan-Hamilton papers ( including drawings, maps and statistical appendices), Richard Temple Collection, HH Risley, C Luard and the Mackenzie Collection. Together these contain a wealth of information, and rare primary source material, on the material life and culture of the peoples of present-day UP, Bihar, Punjab, Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, and erstwhile Madras Presidency comprising the present day states of Andhra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. We would need to supplement these by the reproduction of similar material on the North East contained in the papers of other ethnographers: some of these are kept in the Library of the Centre for South Asia, University of Cambridge.

(g) It is important to stress that all the material procured under this pilot project, should be digitized and its access made open and free to bona fide scholars. Getting microfilm copies and storing these at one of the national repositories functing under the Ministry of Culture is a necessary first step. What is really required for democratizing access to scholars in different parts of India is to have all this material easily accessible on the web. This will take care of two problems (i) the difficulty that scholars have and the expenses incurred in coming to one central site ( in Delhi) for use of these material, and (ii) the wear and tear of the master copy on a microfilm or a disc or any other retreival system and the ease or difficulty of physical access to individual storage sites in Delhi and the issue of “jurisdiction” and “mandate”. Under such an agreement,whether a “particular document” ( in its wide sense) is stored in microfilm or digitized form in NAI or IGNCA would cease to matter.

Museum, land, legacy

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

Announcing the launch of Public Juris

Public Juris: An Online Archive of Legal Resources

This is to announce the launch of Public Juris, an online archive of legal sources.

This message is 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 Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta) who are interested in issues of technology, users and access in relation to state and private archives in India (www.publicarchives.wordpress.com).

The Project:  We are soliciting contributions for  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 consists of 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 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 address below. 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 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.

Looking 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 Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta

In conversation with

Pratiksha Baxi, Anchor, LASS

The address: Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore, Karnataka 560052.

Research Project

We are embarking on a research project in a collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore which over the next two years will support scholarship that produces multi-disciplinary histories of the internets in India.

Towards this end, the project will focus on 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.

The paper will focus on particular users, collectors and collections that make certain issues and questions around archiving pertinent and visible. While it would be possible to do a historical overview of the state archives in these places, the state of cataloguing, etc. this is already available to some degree, and will consume time that could be spent examining questions that are of contemporary political significance and are not often considered in the context of archiving.

Extending the Shelf

 

 Post-1947, what was once considered India is spread across at least three South Asian modern nation-states. Not only does this make trans-national access to archives a necessity, it opens up the possibility of recategorising regional and national archives according to the perspective of the researcher.

 

Following on this idea, we would like to create a consortium of institutions structured around the following possibilities:

 

We want researchers to identify groups, institutions, private collections or focus areas that would benefit if databases of different collections were linked. So for instance, if you could write back and suggest libraries across Bihar, Assam and Bengal that should ideally have a catalogue-sharing system at least, it would help us identify an archiving ‘region’. Or, identifying private or public collections across Assam, Burma and Bangladesh, however undoable this may seem right now, still helps us put in place a plan for the future.

 

A consortium would try to approach a group of such institutions and ask them if they would be interested in embarking on a catalogue-sharing programme, which would hopefully also lead to other interventions.

 

You are invited to write in with ideas for different libraries or archiving regions that can be formed. These need not even be restricted to immediate neighbours, but could be intra-state, or across continents, if mutually agreeable programmes can be drawn up.

 

Questions

A discussion on state and private collections will have to collate very different kinds of information and arrive at different approaches to begin to be able to intervene in defining the possibilities of archiving. To begin to generate public discussions and perhaps different approaches to these questions, we would like information to be made public on the following:

 

 ·        On whether there is information on which historians and archivists are on the Advisory Board for the National Archives of India.

·        On the exchange policies of the National Archives and whether there have been attempts to ask for documents from overseas libraries in exchange for holdings from Indian libraries. Currently the accepted understanding seems to be that in exchange for resources to preserve, the funder can enhance their collection.

 ·        On whether there have been attempts to intervene in state policies on preservation.

 ·        On ongoing dialogues and preservation projects relating to archives and libraries within and across national borders.

·        On whether there is anyone who has thought about the question of archives with respect to intellectual property rights.