With the pandemic upending oral history and material memory projects, archivists and historians are fighting to keep the stories alive before it is too late, but there are many compromises to be made
Bhatia at CAI’s debut exhibition at the Chemould Prescott Road gallery in November 2019
In November 2019, a few weeks before news of the Coronavirus outbreak trickled in from China, the Citizens Archive of India (CAI), a not-for-profit, held its debut exhibition at Fort’s Chemould Prescott Road gallery. Archive director Malvika Bhatia, who had been working on the project since 2017—recording and archiving personal stories of Indians who’d witnessed India through two centuries, using oral history and material memories—remembers how this solo show, was a prelude to an exciting chapter for CAI and the team.
In the intervening years of 2018 and 2019, the team had interviewed nearly 200-odd people. With enough buzz around their exhibition, expanding the project finally seemed like a possibility. Bhatia and CAI’s founder Rohan Parikh charted out a comprehensive plan for 2020. “We decided to hire across other metros to help build the archive, and even hold a larger exhibition,” says Bhatia.
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Malvika Bhatia, archive director at The Citizens’ Archive of India, says her team spent all of 2020 completing the back-end work on transcription and cataloguing. They decided to hold Zoom interviews with their elderly subjects early this year, as many of them have now taken a shine to technology
Until the first week of March 2020, the team was conducting four to six interviews a week. The rising Coronavirus cases in Mumbai, however, pulled the brakes on their project. “Almost all our interviewees were senior citizens [born before 1947]; we couldn’t take that risk.”
For oral historians and archivists like Bhatia, whose projects rely heavily on intimate face-to-face interviews and that too, with an ageing population, the pandemic brought with it a host of challenges. Where the world had almost immediately made the switch to digital, with Zoom, Skype and Google Meets, technology seemed mora a bane than boon. “We considered doing online interviews, even though we weren’t sure if the seniors would warm up to the idea, or if the audio-video quality would be good enough, as we had standards to maintain. Irrespective, we decided to give it a shot. But, people were not comfortable with the technology back then,” remembers Bhatia.
The team unanimously decided to focus on completing the online back-end work, the bulk of which included transcription—transcribing, adding key words, and preparing summaries for each interview—and cataloguing the texts along with the photographs, which were part of the material memory. “It takes time and a lot of care. It’s a lot of manual work. And that’s what everyone did till December. During the lockdown, we also got a lot of requests for access to our interviews, because I think researchers and writers had more time to work on their projects. We were busy processing these requests.”
Anusha Yadav, who took a short break from the Indian Memory Project last year, recently launched a new broadcast WhatsApp number to facilitate easier access to real-life stories and photographs from the archive
However, Bhatia was aware that they were losing out on precious time. Losing an elder was akin to losing a library. “The remarkable thing about the time between April and December was that by then every senior knew how to use Zoom. We even interviewed a 100-year-old, and it worked out well. Of course, the personal touch was missing, but we knew that even if the world opened up anytime soon, meeting in a physical set-up was going to be a distant dream. It was too dangerous.”
Bhatia feels that for oral historians the context, in which the interview takes place, is also important, and the pandemic served as one. “What makes these interviews different is that these seniors have lived through a lot—the freedom struggle, the Partition and World Wars—but have never seen something of this nature. This
setting [online interview] gives a new context to their stories as well,” feels Bhatia, adding, “So what we have now are interviews from the COVID-19 period of our history. It’s been a very sad time for the whole world, but as with any period in history, it is important that we record this too.”
For some memory keepers, though, compromises are impossible to make. Photographer Kurush Umrigar and his collaborator Charvi Thakkar started the World Zoroastrian Archive with the intent to capture the “distinctive features, characteristics and personalities unique to the elders of the ethno-religious Zoroastrian community”.
In December 2019, photographer Kurush Umrigar and his collaborator Charvi Thakkar decided to expand the World Zoroastrian Archive to include oral narratives, apart from black and white portraits of elderly members of the community. They have decided to keep the project on hold, because they believe that a face-to-face interaction cannot be substituted
The photo project—comprising black and white portraits, intended for a coffee-table book—was nearly five years in the making, when in December 2019, the pair decided to expand the archive, to include oral narratives as well. “[In the process of photographing them], we realised that we wanted a slightly more permanent memory of these people, and the fascinating lives they had lived,” shares Umrigar. “We were excited, because, unlike our photo project where we were being selective about our subjects, the archive allowed us to include everyone from the community. All their voices deserve to be heard,” adds Thakkar.
They were just two months into planning the archive, when the lockdown was announced. By then, they had photographed around 35 seniors. “It [the lockdown period] offered us a good breather, to focus on the admin aspect of the archive, which was to write proposals and figure the funding. We remained in that head-space for a while, because well, hope is a good thing,” she adds.
Since this is a fast disappearing generation, Thakkar and Umrigar knew they were racing against time. “But, the essence of our project is to be in front of our subjects, and interact with them in-person. It’s not something we can do over Zoom. We want to keep it tangible,” says Thakkar. Their images, as seen on their website www.kurushumrigar.com/wza, are black and white shots, taken against a plain background, where the focus is mostly on the contours of the face. “We envision our video interviews also to be of a certain kind,” he adds. “We want it to remain relevant for posterity. And the pandemic cannot be an excuse,” adds Thakkar.
At this point, the pair says that they are willing to wait-and-watch. Where they are struggling, though, is with funding. And they admit it’s just not a good time to ask. “We are actively looking for individuals, who understand our work, to invest in it. I think it is a matter of time,” feels Umrigar.
Anusha Yadav, founder-editor of the Indian Memory Project—the world’s first online visual and narrative archive tracing personal identities and histories of the Indian subcontinent through images—says she deliberately took a break from the archive, when the lockdown was imposed. Having worked on it non-stop for nearly 12 years, Yadav felt it was a good time to recuperate and refresh. “I realised that taking a pause wouldn’t make my archive any less important,” she says.
“Though, I was asking for contributions, I sensed that everyone was distracted. I don’t blame them, because that’s how I was feeling as well,” she says, adding, “It didn’t make sense to push. Why waste energy, when you can read the room, and figure out what’s going on?”
By December 2020, she says, work began to move, even if slowly. And by sheer luck, Yadav, in a first, also managed to raise funds, to pay for the interns, she had hired for the project. With a fuller team at her disposal now, she says her motivations levels are high.
That even before the pandemic she encouraged people to share soft copies, guiding them with online tutorials on how to take high resolution photos of old pictures, meant that she didn’t need to drastically change her method of working, to keep her archive alive.
But, she says the pandemic necessitated reinvention.
A few weeks ago, she launched a new broadcast WhatsApp number (9867275219) for Indian Memory Project, to facilitate easier access to the real-life stories and photographs from the archive. People can also use the number to reach out if they’d like to contribute a story. “It’s a very different world now, and there are very different behaviour patterns that are forming [among people], which are also new for us to understand. We can’t depend on our past knowledge on how to promote and market [our project], and communicate with people here on.”
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