On these scraps of paper

In this, the archives are not very different from other artifacts and tools of historical study. The culture of preserving family papers, a huge source of historical study in England, for instance, is virtually non-existent here and even when they have been preserved, in the case of some business houses, they have been vetted away into paleness. The big ones apart, the state of the historical monuments in India leaves much to be desired. It is easy to blame the Archaeological Survey of India for the state of the monuments but here is a comparative figure that might put this blame in some perspective: till some years ago the annual budget of the ASI, at around hundred crores, was less than the annual budget for the National Institute of Fashion Technology.

But it is not only a function of funds. What can the ASI do when the very people for whom it is supposed to conserve monuments begin to encroach? It can hardly inculcate a sense of history in the people. And why exactly should people be bothered about history which is not their own. In a scenario where the Gurjjars have their own history and Jats their own, where the Hindu right has its own icons and the Left their own, what kind of History can unite all those perspectives? History in India is not a settled business, it is constantly in the making, it is contested and evolving. The new “beyond the nation” NCERT history textbooks have now made it difficult to invoke even text book history as a settled business. Against this background, invoking the heroes of the freedom struggle, where negativity towards the English may bring us all together, may make sense. But who, or which caste/ethnic group, would want to celebrate Syed Ahmed Shaheed or Birsa Munda or the early Jinnah? And why should underprivileged groups celebrate heroes for liberating us from the British when the fruits of that liberation have been so unevenly shared?

Even as we fume over the neglect of and necessity for the archive, we should not become unmindful of the reasons why an archive comes into being. The archive is a site which is created for and by the state, to celebrate its monumental status. It is the mechanism whereby the state collects, canonises and stores the information through which it governs the populace. In the case of colonial governments the archive was also an institution that ratified that history was on the side of the ruling group. Colonial forms of government do not only generate knowledge through which they govern, it is knowledge itself which is one of the principal modes of governance. Colonial discussions about land revenue and caste, to take only two issues, copious discussions lasting decades and meticulously stored in triplicate copies, became the principal mode of knowing Indian society and in turn it was through these that Indians came to know each other.

But colonial functionaries who generated this knowledge were also well aware that in times to come, their contingent discussions would appear as neutral history. As one reads the correspondence of these officials, one cannot fail to be affected by the density and sophistication of the discourse. But even as they began archiving their knowledge, there was a self-consciousness to this exercise. Each letter was copied, sometimes in three or four places and diligently stored for posterity. I have been looking at a set of documents called the Mutiny Papers which were put together after the re-conquest of Delhi in 1857. Thousands of these documents, sometimes mere scraps of paper, were carefully collated, filed, catalogued and stored. Its original purpose was that it was to be used as evidence for Bahadur Shah Zafar’s trial. Today, they are sources of history for the period.

So, if imperial consciousness cannot be detached from the creation of an archive in India, the self-understanding of the state must play an important part in the preservation of that archive. The independent Indian state saw itself as the end of history, it had no truck with the past, it wanted to develop and rebuild the future. In this forward-looking vision the archive was an immediate casualty. If the quality of bureaucratic correspondence dips radically after independence so does concern for its preservation, compounded by a culture of secrecy and distrust of citizens. In spite of living in an age of multi-media and the information revolution, governmentality is finding it difficult to shed old habits. The archives of the present will not be built on paper, the odd letter notwithstanding.

The writer is currently compiling a book on the 1857 uprising in Delhi