Holding onto the Past in Present for the Future: Conservation & Preservation in Archives of India

Abstract

Archives are the repositories of sources from the past, however they are also its subjects, sites and the politics of their own. An archive is a product of the forms of decisions taken by its various stakeholders, beginning from those who wrote the papers to the people (archivists) who cared, processed, curated them, to the state machinery that determine the importance of such papers, to the scholars who framed the content of the form after years of spending time with them. In a democracy, the records are the means by which the servants of the public are held accountable to the people. Records have different functions - they are memory to an organisation, tools in the hands of administration, they encapsulate eons of experience, they become source of legal rights, information, and that they merit utmost attention. The article, thus, delves into the two aspects of an archive – Poetics of the Archive i.e., rationale, politics and historical evolution of the institution; and Grammar of the Archive i.e., the methods of conservation and preservation of the records in India.