The language below is an excerpt of an article entitled “Gendered Archives: Imagined and Physical Digital Spaces.” The article originally appeared in the New Delhi journal Women’s Link. It reappears here with the permission of the journal’s editorial board.
In the past 15 years, work reimagining the South Asian archive in a digital space has flourished. Some of these digital archives are extensions of long-standing physical archives such as Abhilekh-Patal, the American Memory collections and the Endangered Archives Programme (National Archives of India, n.d.; Library of Congress, n.d.; The British Library, n.d.). Prominent born-digital archives include Rekhta, the Indian Memory Project and Memories of Delhi Archive. Creating an online archive has several advantages. It requires less capital than a physical archive and can offer direct access to archival content not featured in conventional archives. Digital archiving innovations allow archivists to highlight the remnants of individuals often treated as marginal to history, including women.
Some of the tools developed for digital archiving work explicitly in service of community memory of the colonized or otherwise marginalized. The development of web formats such as Mukurtu have allowed digital formats to be built on the assumption of respect for hierarchies of access in communities with particular relevance for indigenous North American archives. The South Asian American Digital Archive received a grant in 2016 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) alongside Mukurtu to seek an integration of community archives with the National Digital Platform (“IMLS Grant to Diversify,” 2016).However, the inclusion of large collections of material that document aspects of women’s lives is not sufficient to challenge the halo of normativity surrounding the male body and the male experience. Neither is the centering of individual stories of Indians sufficient by itself to decenter settler narratives about South Asia.
Physical archives balance their materiality with their significance as “an imaginative site,” both of which link to “ideological imperatives” (Harris, 2016, pg. 45; Voss & Werner, 1999). Digital archives are more obviously sites of imagination, while their physical aspects—server location, web platform, coding language, Internet connectivity, electricity grid reliability, as well as institutional affiliation, wealth, and social networks—are less immediately visible. Scholarship has linked the emphasis on imaginative possibilities of the digital archive to democratization.
Native women who cohabited with European men were consistently erased from the colonial archive (Ghosh, 2008, pgs. 18–21). [In using the term native women, I take my cue from Durba Ghosh who prefers to avoid the term Indian as a descriptor for women who lived in the South Asian subcontinent in the 18th century.] Recovering evidence of their lives through attention to vocabularies of material items such as textiles, jewelry, and perfume containers, as well as through conventional textual archives, encourages historians to consider evidence of those women beyond their spectral presence in colonial accounts.
Unstable Archive’s emergence is dependent on the support of wealthy academic institutions based in the Global North. The digitization of the material occurred after a grant award from the John Fell Fund, a grant only available for collaborations based in part at the University of Oxford. The creation of the digital archive and its scholarly framing were possible through the support of multiple institutions within the University of Pennsylvania, including the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Scheme and the Penn Trustees Fund for Women Faculty. The founding of the University of Pennsylvania was dependent on the colonization of the indigenous territory referred to as Lenapehoking, the traditional homelands of the Lenape people (Association of Native Alumni, n.d.).
Penn & Slavery Project has established that many of the University of Pennsylvania’s founders, early trustees and faculty-owned slaves have contributed substantially, in an indirect way, to the institution’s considerable wealth (Penn & Slavery Project, n.d.). These conditions are relevant to assess the benefit of a digital archive based at the University of Pennsylvania, particularly when it aims to document and enable better understandings of native women who cohabited with European men. Those women bore children by and sometimes married East India Company officials, which sits uneasily in postcolonial nationalist histories and can be sentimentalized in imperial histories, complicating attempts to find funding for a nuanced study. Imperial histories may prefer to paint the alliances as motivated purely by affection, ignoring the clear power imbalances at play. Postcolonial histories may struggle to look beyond the clear evidence of coercion to consider other avenues for agency in native cohabitants’ lives. Both extremes preclude an intersectional analysis of women such as Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa.
Even for nonprofit institutions in the Global North and Global South, the success of a community-centered digital archiving process is linked to livelihood. The construction of nonprofit community or personal archives underwrites the careers of the scholars and librarians who labor to build them.
Women’s cultural practices and products have been consistently under-documented in historiography in all regions and contexts. In born-digital archives’ emphasis on community history, there are in theory more opportunities to highlight records of women’s experiences, enriching historical approaches to South Asia. On the other hand, scholars have observed that “the digital data commodity is both gendered and racialized” (Fuchs, 2017, p.677). Fuchs’ observations build on a Marxist feminist framework to observe that patriarchy involves not only sexist oppression but “exploitation of house workers in capitalism” (Fuchs, 2017, p. 678). He observes that in the digital sphere, archives benefit from social media engagement or crowd-sourced research and analysis, activities he describes as unpaid labor. Kylie Jarrett used the term “the digital housewife” to describe the activities of clicking, sharing, and commenting that drive the digital economy, comparing its role in the accumulation of capital with the way unpaid domestic workers contributed to economic surplus in a Marxist framework (Jarrett, 2016, pg. 17). She makes use of the work by Arjun Appadurai who has observed the social properties of transactions. In other words, “today’s gift is tomorrow’s commodity” (Jarrett,2016, pg. 15). Community archiving projects and projects that build on private archives build on a wealth of unpaid labor, but digital archival material about women also focuses on large collections of archival material relevant to women in the aggregate, implying that the size of the collection is sufficient to making major theoretical interventions.
Making the observations of how unpaid labor is linked to livelihoods of academics, artists and designers committed to experimentation in the field of digital archiving is not to discount the insight that these archives offer. By accruing many micro histories, these projects reveal the “multiple life-worlds” of a single city such as Delhi (Memories of Delhi Archive, n.d.) and offer a “powerful and historical palimpsest of a largely undocumented society and subcontinent” (Indian Memory Project, n.d.). Working with private archives requires commitment to building trust with families through transparency and respect, commitments inconsistent with a singular focus on profit. Obtaining informed consent from all participants, posting rules and regulations regarding consent, and remaining committed to transparency in obtaining open access rights to the archived material are essential practices for the digital archivist, whether entrepreneurial or institutionally affiliated.
A significant aspect of digital archiving projects has been its commitment to recording “multiple metanarratives,” an effort envisioned as equalizing (Voss & Werner, 1999; Manoff, 2004). Katherine Harris, building on Jacques Derrida’s (1998) work on the archive, links the digital archive’s potential for boundless accumulation to its instability. “The digital archive’s instability threatens these metanarratives because of its potential for endless accumulation – a contamination” (Harris, 2016, pg. 45). The archive is “contaminated” by the archivist’s shaping of it, in part because his or her shaping of the archive stands in tension with the twin desires of the classic archive—“to return to the origins intermixed with the desire to hold everything in the mind’s eye” (Harris, 2016, pg. 46). At the same time, the archive is a holding space, rarely closely reading or analyzing all its materials. Kenneth Price characterizes an archive in a digital context as “a purposeful collection of digital surrogates,” in contrast to material artifacts (2009). In some cases, the digital copy of the material artifact survives the original. Upon the death of Lala Narain Prasad, for example, many of his photographs, digitized as part of Memories of Delhi/Dilli ki yaadein, were discarded, surviving only as digital copies in the archive (Memories of Delhi Archive, n.d.).
Work on family archives requires a commitment to shifting the focus of history “from grand narratives to personal experiences and individual agency” (Holtschneider, 2019). This shift also requires an examination of the practices of writing history. Prominent examples of projects that have made this shift and conducted the concomitant critique of historiography are Hannah Holtschneider’s work on the family archives of Holocaust victims and Anna Woodham’s work considering the family archive “as an important and undervalued site of meaning and identity construction” (Holtschneider, 2019; Woodham et al., 2017). At the same time, there is some debate about the importance of gender in determining the ownership of family archives. According to Evans, women are often considered the natural caretakers of certain aspects of family history, including family trees and ephemeral material items of small “economic value” (Evans, 2012; Higgs & Radosh, 2013). According to Leong (2013), in contrast, there is ample evidence of family archives as collaborations involving men and women.
On the other hand, when engaging with private archives that deal with family lineages, family trees are usually organized around male members, centered on the succession of fathers and sons. This is partly because the practice of women joining their husband’s family upon marriage and their changing their names upon marriage to adopt the husband’s family name can make it notoriously difficult to trace female ancestors. At the University of Pennsylvania, the archive of Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa (1758–1822) is inflected by the lack of information about native women who cohabited with European men (Ghosh, 2008; Chatterjee,2002).In familial relationships between European men and native women, the absence of documentation of women’s lives reveals the intersectional impact of both gender and ethnicity on power relations. These notable absences demand an explicit attention to silences and erasures in the construction of our digital archive.
For instance, the family tree of Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa includes next to no information about her father or brothers; in contrast, the family has a wealth of documentation and material history relating to the history of her husband, Gerard Gustavus Ducarel. The couple’s daughter’s baptismal record records only the name of her father (“Somerset, England,”n.d.), erasing the identity of the mother in keeping with trends for other children born of alliances between European men and native women (Ghosh, 2008).In fact, the archival remnants of Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa, a woman referred to has Zafanaiza, or “the Persian Princess,” for multiple generations, lived in a box of files dedicated to her husband rather than in a file of her own. A decade of significant correspondence was discarded from the otherwise meticulously preserved family archive, obscuring the origins of this South Asian woman who married Gerard Gustavus Ducarel. Today, Dowager Lady Dione Palmer, the husband of Sharaf un-Nisa’s descendent, along with her male cousin Fergus Madden, have taken active, collaborative roles in documenting and organizing the family history of Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa, with several family members, male and female, collaborating to produce and protect it.
The micro-historical emphasis of many digital community archiving projects means that the significance of curated pull-out exhibits, features, and keywords, and the capabilities of search functions influence the patterns that emerge, or do not emerge, in engaging with a digital archive (Harris, 2016; Prince, 2009).
In the Unstable Archives project, we are grappling with the time-intensive process required in thematic encoding for the archive of an 18th century woman named Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa who was born in Bihar and moved to England to live with her children by a European man. The Unstable Archives project, taking its cue from Schilperoort, engages in thematic keyword identification of archival objects in order to ensure that the archive speaks more incisively to scholars and the public. The small scale of the archive and the micro-historical emphasis of its documentation are in response to archives that emphasize scale as a metric of value for digital archival projects on the lives of women.
Each entry in a digital archive requires a number of processes that involve cataloguing each entry and recording metadata for the entry. The combination of keywords and search capabilities means that a single entry can offer insights into marriage, divorce, Bollywood and courtesans, even if all those keywords do not appear (Walia, 2016). On the other hand, the process behind the selection of the keywords appears to be idiosyncratic according to the search engine. When internet searches dominate modes of informal and even scholarly research, keyword practices have a significant impact on the shape of scholarship and teaching (Peters, 2016). Digital archives subscribe to wildly diverging practices in keyword attribution, and there is still little agreement on how to attach or revise keywords to submissions, even in formal academic articles with authors usually suggesting their own keywords. Anusha Yadav explains in a 2020 article that she determines the keywords for each entry, while other digital archives do not make transparent the modes by which they determine keyword attribution.
Scholarship by Hannah Schilperoort has analyzed three digital archives focusing on women authors “for evidence of encoding practices and computational text analysis experimentation that supports feminist scholarship” (2015). Schilperoort accurately states that although there “is no doubt that the act of encoding is an interpretative act,” those assigning keywords have tended to focus on keywords that describe structural elements instead of interpretive categories. There is anxiety among coders that may lead to a resistance to acknowledging that “adding markup adds another interpretative level to the text rather than simply describing objective, inherent or static content elements” (Schilperoort, 2015).
The Unstable Archives project aims to determine keywords through a mix of structural and thematic terms, emphasizing a proliferation of thematic possibilities by aiming to attach a minimum of 10 keywords to each archival item. This practice, while consistent with other digital projects’ commitments to contesting meta-narratives, involves searching for academic articles that discuss similar artifacts and historical contexts and copying keywords of related scholarship. The practice of attaching keywords to academic articles is a recent phenomenon limited to the digital age, limiting the pool of relevant academic articles consulted. The Unstable Archives project also expresses its commitment to feminist and queer praxis in the archive by emphasizing keywords that relate to gender and its study in the academy. Keyword attribution remains limited by the academic expertise of the leadership team and the website’s beta readers. In an attempt to correct for these limitations, each archival entry will include a suggestion box, allowing viewers to suggest the addition of new keyword tags, as well as corrections in interpretation. While this method will rely on unpaid labor of invested readers and the suggestions will be evaluated by an academic research team before being approved, the archival teams’ commitment to answering this correspondence will also augment the possibility of Unstable Archives forming community thinking about the lives of native “consorts” in the colonial period.
This article recommends four practical steps that could improve the quality of digital archival projects related to women’s lives in South Asia. The first is sustained institutional investment, including international collaborations, making it possible to commit scholarly resources to the nuanced framing of the material held in private archives. The second is digital archival projects that dedicate part of their archive to explicit documentation of approaches to family archiving practices, coding, keyword selection, translation, and transcription of non-Roman scripts. The open-source sharing of this documentation will facilitate the creation of best practices for digital archives, even at institutions with fewer financial resources than are available in the Global North, allowing developers of digital archives to embed feminist praxis into their creation as well as innovations from queer theory that allow for multiple, malleable methods of categorization. Third, it is necessary to examine the Global South as a significant site of digital archival experimentation; two of the significant digital archiving projects in India discussed in this article contradict some gendered notions of family history that dominate in the Global North in their emphasis on collaborations between men and women in preserving family history.Fourth, scholars and digital entrepreneurs should include rigorous attention to masculinity and its formations, as well as gender minorities, in the curation of digital archives. An explicit emphasis on masculinity, denaturalizing the assumption of male normativity, is coherent with both feminist and queer approaches to the digital archive.
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