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ABSTRACT
These notes are based on an ongoing project for building an archive of a premier women’s college, Miranda House (established 1948), University of Delhi. We begin with a brief overview of the processes and methodologies involved in identifying materials to shape our collection, discuss processes of cataloguing, digitization, planning digital collections and a website. Our collection lies at the cusp of being an institutional archive, women’s archive, archive of college women as well as an archive for doing public history. Despite the challenges of infrastructure, trained staff, technological expertise, digital humanities offer us immensely exciting possibilities. We use social media to reach out to alumni to build our collections, social media presence to showcase our materials, digital tools to widen access, share skills and create awareness regarding the significance of archiving the history of college women. Our attempts at DH have been quite successful. However, as DH opens up a plethora of opportunities, doing digital history also has its methodological challenges as well as conceptual and financial concerns for feminist projects like ours.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by funding given by the SNDT University, Mumbai, through the Avabai Wadia Archive Fellowship (2019–20). I am immensely grateful for this award. I express my gratitude to Prof. Bijayalaxmi Nanda, the Principal, Miranda House for understanding the urgency of the project and mustering all available resources to support us. Gorvika, Pawan and Devika, their friendship and for making it a collective passion. To Gayatri, Sonal, Amrutha, Jaya, Shyambhavi and all the students, non-teaching colleagues and alumni who come along with us each day, thank you and together we shall not forget.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2023.2271273.
Notes
1. Earl and Countess Mountbatten attend the Jubilee Convocation of Delhi University (1948), Gaumont British Newsreel (Reuters) hosted by the British Pathe΄on YouTube. Web. 20 September 2021.
2. When I started this project, it was Pawan and I, a friend and colleague from the Department of English, Gorvika Rao, two postgraduate students Devika Gupta and Gayatri Punj then joined us. For more on our student interns, see our website at mirandahousearchive.in.
3. Dr Avabai Wadia Archive Fellowship (2019–20) by Research Centre for Women’s Studies, SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai.
4. ‘Activists Condemn the Arrest of Pinjra Tod Members Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal’. Leaflet.in. 26 May 2020. Web. 28 May 2020.
5. Shaheen Bagh protest was a peaceful protest where women blocked a road in Delhi at Shaheen Bagh by sitting in. This protest by Muslim women was against the CAA (Citizen Amendment Act) passed on 11 December 2019.
6. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Jane Kamensky, ‘Women Making History: Ten Objects, Many Stories’, Harvard History Course, HarvardX, online. Web. August 2020.
7. This women’s archive and organisation was begun by C S Lakshmi, Neera Desai and Maithreyi Krishna Raj in 1988 and it has an online presence now.
8. Recently that has changed with a new skill based course in the undergraduate curriculum introduced in University of Delhi in 2022.
9. See @mh.archiving project on Facebook.
10. See @mharchivingproject on Instagram.
11. See @mharchiving on Twitter. This account we have not been able to update regularly as the platforms are changing fast.
12. Miranda House archive has a dedicated website https://mirandahousearchive.in/ and it is also linked to our college website https://www.mirandahouse.ac.in.
13. We have had visiting faculty members and research scholars from Rhode Island University, University of Oxford, writers and students from varied backgrounds.
14. For more see Aarushi Agarwal, ‘Miranda House Archiving Project Collects Alumni Stories to View Institutional History through Student’s Eyes’. Firstpost.com. 10 Nov., 2020 Web. 12 Sept., 2023.
15. See Sukrita Baruah, ‘Miranda House Traces History of College, its Students – with Some Help’. Indianexpress.com. 01 Oct., 2020. Web. 12 Sept., 2023.
16. See Sukrita Baruah, ‘Miranda House College’s First Day in 1948: A Downpour and 30 Drenched Students’. Indianexpress.com. 08 Oct., 2022. Web. 20 Sept., 2023. Also, see Arushi Bhaskar, ‘Tornado in Delhi, Waiters in DU College and More: How Miranda House Archiving Project Unearthed the City’s History’. Indianexpress.com. 26 Jan., 2023. Web. 23 Sept., 2023.
17. See ‘Miranda House Exhibits 75 Years of Establishment through Archival Project’. Timesofindia.indiatimes.com. 27 Jan., 2023. Web. 21 Sept., 2023.
18. The website has a range of information under the cultural events section which proved very useful. https://www.raa.se/ is. Web. 12 Sept., 2023.
19. These guidelines for digitisation and cataloguing are available on the website under the Endangered Archives Programme run by the British Library, UK.
20. See the advocacy section on their website to know more about how to create stories and encourage public awareness. www2.archivists.org. Web.
21. See their website www.milli.link and find more on their international archival week proceedings.
22. See ww.tasveerghar.net for more on the history of its project and its new institutional space.
23. This project collects photographs and documents stories from a wide range of people and has a website called indianmemoryproject.com.
24. This is a company that charges families who are interested in archiving their histories which are then produced in a limited edition of books specially produced for the family. They also have a website under the name of familyfablescompany.com.
25. See their depository at zikredilli.com.
26. See the delhimemories.in website run by the Ambedkar University.
27. The 1947Partition Archive is a crowdsourced archiving project that has also been supported by a wide range of institutions such as the Stanford University, University of Delhi, American India Foundation and more. The idea of citizen historians has been very successful in creating awareness and bringing a wide set of people together in building their collections.
28. For more on the Europeana network see their website.
29. Hannah-Ellis Petersen, ‘Indian Government Accused of Rewriting History After Edits to Schoolbooks’. Theguardian.com. 06 Apr., 2023. Web. 19 Sept., 2023.
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Shweta Sachdeva Jha
Shweta Sachdeva Jha teaches English at Miranda House, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in History as a Felix Scholar from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her interests range from women’s history, children’s picture books, Urdu popular literature to digital archives. Her research on the tawa’if include chapters in edited volumes such as Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia (Duke University Press, 2015), The Bollywood Islamicate: Idioms, Histories and Imaginaries (Orient Blackswan, 2022). Her work on genre fiction in Urdu can be found in volumes such as South Asian Gothic: Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media (University of Wales Press, 2021) and Sultana’s Sisters: Gender, Genres, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction (Routledge, 2021). She has been the recipient of the Delhi University Research Innovations Grant (2015–2016), Avabai Wadia Archival Fellowship by SNDT University of Women, Mumbai (2020) and the Tata Trusts-Partition Archive Research Grant (2021).