Archive In India Research Articles

A collaboratory model for creation of digital language archives in India

PurposeThis paper aims to explore a model of digital language archiving based on a collaboration between under-resourced indigenous communities and an institutional library. The model’s effectiveness is assessed in creating resources and digital language archives to support speaker communities and language documentation programmes for endangered and lesser-known languages in India.Design/methodology/approachThe model of SiDHELA, the first indigenous language archive developed in India at Sikkim University by the Centre for Endangered Languages in collaboration with the Central Library, is described.FindingsThis study finds that localised repositories developed in collaboration with institutional libraries work as a more effective and accessible resource centre for indigenous communities, rather than the centralised data stores that collate all language data, which is the dominant method of language documentation in the world.Social implicationsIt is the authors’ belief that the active role of libraries in language documentation and preservation of indigenous knowledge will open future gateways for language revitalization for under-resourced languages of the world.Originality/valueSiDHELA is a novel attempt at localised digital language archiving in collaboration with indigenous communities of Sikkim and the North Bengal region of India.

About the Contributors

Other| June 01 2022 About the Contributors GLQ (2022) 28 (3): 487–488. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9738615 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation About the Contributors. GLQ 1 June 2022; 28 (3): 487–488. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9738615 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search Anjali Arondekar is professor of feminist studies and founding codirector of the Center for South Asian Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research engages the poetics and politics of sexuality, caste, and historiography, with a focus on Indian Ocean studies and South Asia. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (2009), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2010. Her second book, Abundance: Sexuality, Historiography, Geopolitics (forthcoming from Duke University Press), grows out of her interest in the figurations of sexuality, caste, and capital in colonial British and Portuguese India.Baird Campbell holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Rice University and an MA in Latin American studies from Tulane University. His research engages queer activism in post-dictatorship Chile through... You do not currently have access to this content.

Documents, Digitisation and History

Recent years have seen a very large rise in digitisation projects in various state-administered archives in India, including the National Archives of India and regional archives in different parts of the country. This essay argues that rather than increasing access and transparency, digitisation serves to reproduce and potentially even increase state control over historical sources and memory. In addition, the elision of context in digitised collections in state archives poses problems for historical research, particularly for scholars from less privileged institutions. It is imperative that these efforts go beyond an understanding of digitisation as conservation alone in order to harness the creative and pedagogical possibilities offered by digital technology to influence, and even transform, the historical scholarship of a wide variety of users.

Collection Development of Digital Archives in India: A Case Study of Jadavpur University

The free flow of information is a fundamental principle for bridging the gaps between have and have not. ICT has a major impact of materials for research. Innovationin ICT has brought radical changes in the way information is generated, stored, processed and disseminated. Recent advances in converging technologies especially Internet and web technology has paved the way to create the open access archives on repositories. The objective of the open access movement is to make scholarly articles freely available in digital form to anyone anywhere in the world. The open access and open archives movement, the need for changes in the scholarly communication to remove barriers to access.

University archives in India: issues, challenges and future trends, an analytical review

Archives are the custodians of their organization’s memory and are preserved as authentic sources of information about past events and activities. As with other types of organization, university ar...

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction Mark Reinberger and Vandana Baweja This, the thirty-first, volume of Arris celebrates the inclusion of a variety of voices to represent our firm commitment to diversity—both in our field and in the membership of the Southeast Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH). The six articles herein examine a wide range of themes and viewpoints, apparent both in the backgrounds of the authors and in their approaches to their topic. The book reviews follow suit, with eight books reviewed that range from the history of the architectural profession to natural and cultural geography. The ordering of articles and reviews simply follows chronology, but the range of subjects and sources of inspiration is what distinguishes this collection. The volume begins with a slice of the history of preservation, the story of a single historic building in Natchez, Mississippi, with the voice of a professional and academic preservationist, Paul Hardin Kapp of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It continues a recent and expanding tradition in SESAH and Arris of embracing preservation as a vital part of the organization and the field. It also celebrates Natchez, where the next SESAH annual meeting will be held. Then follows an article by Mary Springer, an assistant professor of art history at Jacksonville State University, Alabama, which examines the history and meaning of the Cathedral of Learning, a remarkable tall building at the University of Pittsburgh of the 1920s. Another young scholar, Priya Jain, originally from New Delhi, India and now at Texas A&M, produced our third article, a rarity in Arris in that it deals with an South Asian architectural history topic in a global context—the planning of early technical universities in India in the 1950s. The articles by Mary Springer and Priya Jain illuminate the relationship between town and gown in two very different time periods and cultures, which enriches our understanding of architectural history in relationship to globalization. Adjacent to these younger scholars of architectural history, we place Robert Craig, emeritus faculty of Georgia Tech, a fully established scholar and one of the founders of SESAH. Craig returns to the subject of one of his many books, Principia College near St. Louis (one of his many almamaters), and examines its architecture after Bernard Maybeck. The inclusion of this essay continues a new tradition, begun in the Arris Volume 30, of contributions by senior SESAH scholars. The final full article rings with the voice of a practicing and teaching architect, Michael Grogan of Kansas State, who has an abiding love for pure modernism that is evident in his analysis of Mies van der Rohe's Houston Museum of Art. However, the issue is not quite finished because through a multi-disciplinary collaborative effort, a trio of authors—Danielle Willkens, a practicing architect, preservationist, and architectural historian; Heather M. Haley, a doctoral candidate in history at Auburn University, who focuses on twentieth-century American social, military history, and public history; and Junshan Liu, an associate professor at the McWhorter School of Building Science at Auburn University, who works on the applications of Building Information Modeling (BIM), LiDAR, photogrammetry and UAS in construction management—bring us home in a substantial research note with yet another modality, that of computer technology, to demonstrate the remarkable powers of new digital techniques, which can aid in the documentation, restoration, reconstruction, and interpretation of historic structures and sites. Wilkins, Haley, and Liu have written a field note on the Selma Railroad Depot, which has played a pivotal role in the history of Civil Rights in that Alabama city. Along with the diversity of voices comes a wide array of visual images, always a goal of Arris. Among too many to list appear vintage Ezra Stoller photographs; schematic new axonometric analysis figures; drawings from archives in India, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere; Historic American Building Survey drawings and photographs; and frighteningly intricate digital reconstructions. All this has made this volume the longest in the history of Arris, but we hope you do not get tired of reading and deliberating on the intellectual themes covered here. Surely there is something to interest and enlighten everyone. As we've been learning from recent history, variety is not simply the spice...

Melodrama as Method

A striking aspect of the early cinema archive in India is its partial and truncated nature. Other non-Western examples include Iran and Japan, which too have few or no surviving films from the early period. Despite this absence, scholars like Kaveh Askari1 and Aaron Gerow2 have offered innovative and substantive accounts of early film culture in these countries in the face of the unavailability of the films themselves. Here the very lack of material acts as the driving force that spurs film historians to assess cinema's place within a broader institutional framework encompassing a slew of interconnected concerns: modernity, capital, technology, global film traffic, colonialism, genre-formation, and archives of print and visual culture, notwithstanding the academy's own late arrival into this scenario. We were, in other words, smitten by the fragment-frustration became the key motivation for so many of us.In my own research, which began nearly a hundred years after the birth of cinema, I could no longer talk to a flesh and blood person. Like the films, there were few survivors. All that was left was a select group of films that had somehow escaped fires or being thrown into junkyards. My most reliable sources turned out to be autobiographies; as such, they presented informal versions of official history while being selective and somewhat unreliable as chronicles of the lives of famous people.3 Could such quotidian recollections be incorporated into a heuristic mode of academic inquiry? As a scholar, I was faced with considerable anxiety about how to script such material into an acceptable academic framework. Nor did I want to arrange the small number of films in hand into yet another narrative of loss and lament. But because I thought I had nothing, I ended up with a vast amount of material once I overcame the initial stumbling block of what constituted an archive: song booklets, publicity materials, film posters, newspaper advertisements, interviews-oral and informal modes of remembrance (including my grandmother's coy account of watching her first movie in a darkened room reserved exclusively for society ladies). Scouring libraries and film archives, I became a scavenger of sorts, wading through a heap of other unlikely sources such as the German periodical Lichtbild-Buhne, the British serial Bioscope, and even American newspapers like the New York Times. Could such material, which featured little narrative content, be part of film scholarship that fell outside the purview of ethnographic observation and commentary? I was torn between focusing on what appeared to be private and inconsequential and accounting for cinema's public role. Veering between embarrassment and excitement, I soon realized that what I needed was an academic voice that could reckon with scraps and account for the personal in the academic. I had to be able to speak about the quotidian and foreground the marginal-no matter how contingent, I needed a rubric that was attentive to a larger domain of historical production where the experience of early cinema was being expressed and articulated.Was there a method to this madness? Not surprisingly, it is in the quotidian that the history of melodrama became visible. Melodrama's other pseudonyms had to be excavated from the vocabularies of colonial dominance. Materials that were peripheral to cinema threw melodrama's umbrella-like emergence into sharp relief, revealing paths that were quite different from its American, German, or British trajectories. Indian newspaper advertisements foregrounded an entirely different set of genres that were specific to the formation of the film industry. Whether it was the mythological, the historical, the stunt, or the social, melodrama appeared again and again as the connective tissue that linked disparate genres, appearing primarily through the dramatization of conflicts between good and evil, and through the repeated manifestation of novel forms of suffering. As a mode, melodrama was both familiar and unfamiliar, heimlich (homelike) in its Manichaenization of good and evil while the specifics of its mobilization of form and affect made it Indian and quite unheimlich (un-homelike) from the perspective of western film theory and history. …

Past and Present Scenario of Open Access Movement in India

This paper gives an overview of open archives developed during the period of 2004–2012 in India including institutional, subject, cross repositories, etc. It also depicts the actions taken by the Indian government in response to the OA developments. The paper highlights that there are one cross institutional repository, three cross institutional electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) repositories, three subject repositories, five institutional ETD repositories, and twenty-five functional institutional repositories registered in the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). It also gives an account of the National Knowledge Commission of India which has proposed a model to continue and expand the number of research papers being put in Open Access by establishing a specific fund for Open Access research. The paper provides the background to, and contemporary issues in, the development of open archives in India. It sum ups with the latest developments initiated by the Indian government, corporate organizations, etc. towards the success of the Open Access movement.

VUNA: A Prototype for Organisation and Retrieval of Newspaper Items

This is the age of information explosion. A massive quantity of information is being generated, a large portion of which is found in newspapers. It is posing a unique challenge for information managers for processing information and providing required information to information seekers. This article discusses a newspaper information retrieval system named Vidyasagar University News Archive (VUNA), which has been developed by information specialists for effective management and retrieval of information from newspapers. This article highlights the salient technical issues related to the development of a prototype online digital newspaper information retrieval system suitable for India. The basic architecture, operational features, etc. have been discussed and a comparative picture of respective performance and failures of existing online newspaper archives in India and VUNA also has been drawn. Bangladesh Journal of Library and Information Science Vol.2(1) July 2012 pp.22-38DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/bjlis.v2i1.12916

For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. By Anjali Arondekar. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. xii, 215 pp. $74.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. By Anjali Arondekar. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. xii, 215 pp. $74.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

The Lure of the Archive: New Perspectives from South Asia

The LureoftheArchive: New Perspectives from South Asia RubyLai The question of the archive has long occupied historians and non-historians alike, who have theorized the politics of archival research, unfolded the many meanings of the "archive," and questioned the politi cal and intellectual implications of its enticements. For a while now, scholars of South Asia have made key contributions to this critical explo ration. They have investigated the question of the archive and its relation to historiography; challenged the grand narratives (nation, empire, community, history, "family"1) assumed to be easily visible in the official archives; worked with the idea of the "fragment" (as something that inter rupts and opens up new questions and avenues of inquiry); raised critical questions about speech and silence ("the woman question"; "can the subaltern speak?"); and focused on understanding and troubling everyday forms of resistance and theorizing on behalf of the other.2 This array of writings has not only contested the category of what is "admissible" into the historical record but has also raised profound concerns about what constitutes the "real," problems of representation and chronology, the boundaries of history, and history's relationship to modernity. So why turn to the question once again? Perhaps because the question of the archive is not—and cannot be— obsolete. Three recently published studies that I discuss in this article are a testimony to its compelling power as concept and as material reality. The FeministStudies37, no. 1 (Spring 2011). © 2011 by Ruby Lai 93 94 RubyLai archive continues to obsess the historian and the non-historian (one of the authors under discussion here is a literary critic; the other two are historians) in productive ways. What we have in the writings of these three authors are three rather different kinds of engagement with the archive and with the question of the archive. In this essay, I underline the innovative possibilities for thinking histories, lives, figures, spaces—and the archive—that they open up. Even though only one of the three books under review deals directly with the question of the archive, all these works engage with archival uncertainties and conundrums in ways that make their projects even more fascinating. The subjects that these authors investigate are not "obvious" in any way. Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India opens with a discussion of a report on the male brothels of Karachi Books Discussed in This Article For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. By Anjali Arondekar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre: Victorian Anglo-Indian MP and "Chancery Lunatic." By Michael Fisher. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal. By Rochona Majumdar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. that nineteenth-century scholar and explorer Richard Burton is supposed to have written but which has never been located; Michael Fisher, in The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre: Victorian Anglo-Indian MP and "Chancery Lunatic," analyzes the "identity" of a "prince" (who is not a prince by birth) in nineteenth-century colonial India; and Rochona Majumdar, in Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal, examines the imagined tradition of arranged marriages. These are not the standard stories or familiar figures we usually meet in accounts of imperialism and of the colonial archive. When the sexual practices of colonized subjects, Begum Sombre, David Dyce, or the "traditional" Bengali family—what might be classed as the general subjects of these books—come into view in the colonial record, it is often as evidence of debasement, backwardness, insanity, or orientalness, as RubyLai 95 if they were already fully known and justifiably disparaged. What is more, even the most complex scholarly involvement does not always avoid an orientalized construction of people such as harem folk or "prostitutes." Often, in cases such as these, scholars have simply assumed that we already know all there is to know. Or perhaps the real problem is that we have failed to investigate many of these themes and figures on the assumption that there is little that they can tell us about "real" history. Arondekar's For the Record is...

Preface

preface In fall 2000, Feminist Studies published a special issue on gender studies in India and the South Asian diaspora, reviewing the trajectory of women's movements and identity formations and offering potent writing on citi zenship, community, and nationalism. Over ten years later, this special issue presents important advances in feminist scholarship on the region. In a decade that has witnessed the official decriminalization of homosexu ality, a vibrant sex workers' movement, female politicians holding the reins of state and national governments, expanding markets, and horrific violence against religious minorities, feminists have both refined and recast the scope of their analyses. Some of the most important contribu tions are found in scholarship on sexuality and intimate relationships, offering alternatives to standardized binary formulations of sexual desire and subjectivity. Whereas the forms and ramifications of marriage—its minimum age, its property, and status implications—have long been objects of critique in Indian feminism, recent scholarship moves the debate forward by de-centering the heterosexual couple, tracing desires and identities that flourish beyond hegemonic dictates. This special issue covers archival, ethnographic, filmic, and case law sources that underline the instability of the heterosexual couple. It presents a range of conjugali ties by documenting various arrangements of procreation and household economies: from devadasi women gifted to goddesses, to lesbians who wed, to rapists who marry their victims as a means to atone for their violence. It offers scholarly and creative reflections on the place of sexuality in the formulation of gender categories, the nuclear couple, and caste differ ences. Drawing on the rich historical and anthropological record in India, the essays and artistic works in this issue provide an engaging set of refer ence points and a new politics of visibility on questions of intimacy, conju gality, and sexuality. Feminist Studies37, no. 1 (Spring 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 7 Preface In our first essay, titled "Abundance and Loss: Queer Intimacies in South Asia," Naisargi Dave provides a clear sense of the shifting terrain of sexuality studies in South Asia. Reviewing a set of recently published books that demonstrate and examine the inventive fecundity of queer life," Dave argues that what these books contribute is not merely their documentation of these extraordinary moments of queer presence but also their "tentative embrace of loss that lies at the heart of liberatory poli tics, if not of (queer) love itself." Through this embrace, this active—and Dave argues, enabling—grappling with loss, the four books chosen, namely, Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, Maya Sharma's Loving Women: Being Lesbian and Unprivileged in India, Ruth Vanita's Love's Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West, and Gayatri Reddy's With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India, illuminate these very tensions, between presence and absence, between "the will to know and a willingness to acknowledge some things as unknowable." Tracking a range of entitlements—the entitlement to seek (Arondekar); to speak (Vanita); to be respected, to care and be cared for (Reddy); and to love (Sharma)—these four books occupy, even "constitute," the space of inti macy, a space that is "driven by a tension between presence and absence, one made manifest in the desire to both have the other and to love the other from a distance that enables human flourishing." And it is precisely this intimate space, and these productive tensions, that the books—and Dave's essay—capture so well. Lucinda Ramberg, in "When the Devi Is Your Husband: Sacred Marriage and Sexual Economy in South India," presents an ambitious agenda for recasting marriage and sexual exchange. Instead of focusing on objectification and agency, their most common conceptual girders, Ramberg focuses on how value is produced through marriage. Reflecting on her ethnographic work among devotees of the goddess Yellamma in southern India, as well as classic texts in feminist political economy, she argues that marriage is a technology for producing particular kinds of persons and value. Rather than placing married women and devadasis in opposition, as many conventional accounts do, she locates them within a single system. In noting that both daughters and devadasis are gifted by...

<em>For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India</em>, by Anjali Arondekar

<em>For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India</em>, by Anjali Arondekar

Bibliography of Primary Sources of the Pre-Nineteenth Century East African Coast

The following bibliography is intended to supplement the excellent one (largely) of secondary sources compiled by Thomas Spear and published inHistory in Africa27(2000). Research for a forthcoming monograph on the East African coast in the ‘middle’ period has taken me in recent years into a number of libraries and archives in India, East Africa, and Europe. There I have been able to build an extensive listing of source material and oral informants interviewed in East Africa. While this compilation includes many of the titles in Spear's list, study carried out in Goa and Lisbon afforded me the opportunity of viewing primary sources not included in Spear's collection. Despite the fact that this is still a work in progress, I submit this supplementary list hoping it might prove useful to other scholars interested in East Africa and the western Indian in the pre- and early-modern period.Readers also will note that I have included some secondary listings not included in Spear's bibliography. This is due to the fact that my ideas concerning what is relevant to coastal history appear to be somewhat broader than Spear's. Consequently, this list includes some titles on southern and central Africa, as well as of coastal literature, which I have found to be useful and apposite to coastal studies. Naturally, I have tried not to duplicate titles found in Spear's list.

Problematic spaces, problematic races: defining ‘europeans’ in late colonial india

Abstract This article considers how women and men acquired ‘European’ status in gender-specific ways in colonial India between the late nineteenth century and independence in 1947. Being considered ‘European’ in this setting required far more than ancestry and biological attributes, and depended heavily on class, culture, occupation and ongoing imperial border crossings that allowed individuals to maintain direct contact with Britain. Those born in India who failed to remain transient due to limited family incomes risked the stigma of becoming ‘domiciled Europeans‘, a group which strongly resembled (and was often equated with) the mixed-race Anglo-Indian community in socio-economic and cultural terms. The geographical location of children's schooling and the careers for which their education prepared them played crucial roles in determining perceptions of their adult racial status, and this article distinguishes between young women's and men's experiences by examining materials from school archives in India, official publications, and a range of contemporary and retrospective personal narratives.

Problematic spaces, problematic races: defining ‘Europeans’ in late colonial India

This article considers how women and men acquired ‘European’ status in gender-specific ways in colonial India between the late nineteenth century and independence in 1947. Being considered ‘European’ in this setting required far more than ancestry and biological attributes, and depended heavily on class, culture, occupation and ongoing imperial border crossings that allowed individuals to maintain direct contact with Britain. Those born in India who failed to remain transient due to limited family incomes risked the stigma of becoming ‘domiciled Europeans‘, a group which strongly resembled (and was often equated with) the mixed-race Anglo-Indian community in socio-economic and cultural terms. The geographical location of children's schooling and the careers for which their education prepared them played crucial roles in determining perceptions of their adult racial status, and this article distinguishes between young women's and men's experiences by examining materials from school archives in India, official publications, and a range of contemporary and retrospective personal narratives.