Archival Imaginaries and the Politics of History in South Asia

This project looks at the rise of internet platforms dealing in histories of the Indian subcontinent. It asks how, why and for whom these platforms constitute 'archives'. It examines the affective, material, visual and geopolitical registers they deploy and conjure, situating them in relation to institutional and/or stubbornly analogue collections; activist media projects; and popular history initiatives in Africa and the Middle East.

The past decade has seen the proliferation of ‘citizens archives’, ‘picture libraries’ and ‘memory projects’ dedicated to the history of South Asia. I first encountered these platforms, which mobilise visual and material artefacts, and range from purpose-built websites to Instagram handles and Facebook groups that spill over into exhibitions and coffee table books, whilst researching the development of amateur and domestic photography in the subcontinent. Images that had hitherto been stored in albums and trunks or tucked away in letters were suddenly available online, annotated, animated and reconfigured by the efforts of family members, artists, designers, entrepreneurs, volunteers and audiences both local and global.

My new project grapples with this apparent archival abundance, this traffic in ‘pictures’ and ‘memories’. I probe the logics and logistics that have brought these materials to the surface, and the work that goes in to keeping them there. I also look at the persistence of older, institutional and activist modes of retrieval and representation. In pursuing an ethnography of archival imaginaries and agents, I hope to better account for how history is flattened into and fashioned out of everyday matter, and how it takes political shape. 

Research questions:

Who are the ‘citizens’ who are turning to – and being produced by – popular history platforms in and of South Asia? 

What are the affective, aesthetic and practical registers of this mobilisation: are these platforms sites of leisure, labour, confrontation, escape? Are they characterised by sustained engagements or sporadic, even singular interactions? How are they funded, what - materially - do they generate?

What does the traffic in materials as intimate as ‘memories’ and ‘pictures’ entail? What, specifically, does it mean for disenfranchised people and minority groups? 

How do practices of digitally crowdsourcing, animating, annotating and circulating historic materials depend on analogue mobilisations? How, moreover, do they keep in place hegemonic modes of history-making, from the nationalist to the capitalist? And when and where do they revitalise these spaces and relations, and foster solidarity or lines of flight?