Dear Friends:
This is from NY Times today(21 03 2012): -bhuban Repairing the Damage at India’s National Archives By DINYAR PATEL Manpreet Romana for The New York Times Mushirul Hasan, director general, National Archives of India, in his office in New Delhi. When he took charge of the National Archives of India in May 2010, Mushirul Hasan inherited a rudderless institution. The job of director general had been vacant for several years, and past directors had been bureaucrats. Mr. Hasan became the first scholar in 30 years to oversee an institution that contained a dazzling array of material from the Mughal, British and post-independence periods of Indian history. “I wanted to provide a corrective to institutional malaise,” Mr. Hasan said. Manpreet Romana for The New York Times A letter written by J.W. Atkinson requesting Dadabhai Naoroji for a donation in 1900, can be accessed at the Private Papers section of the National Archives. Decades of neglect, underfunding, and bad preservation techniques have wrought considerable damage. The letters of the Bengali intellectual Romesh Chunder Dutt, for example, are warped due to humidity. A similar fate afflicts the papers of Dadabhai Naoroji, another early nationalist leader (Naoroji’s trademark gold-rimmed spectacles, meanwhile, were stolen from a Mumbai museum in 1998). Mr. Naoroji kept carbon copies of his outgoing correspondence but the vast majority of these had simply dissolved into powder. A draft of his 1906 speech to the Indian National Congress in Kolkata, then referred to as Calcutta, where for the first time a prominent Congress leader endorsed the concept of “swaraj” or self-rule for India, is in fragments, held together with a rusted nail. The handwriting of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s earliest surviving letter to Mr. Naoroji, dating from 1897, can no longer be read through the laminated sheets intended to preserve it. Manpreet Romana for The New York Times The first information report of the murder of Mahatma Gandhi on Jan. 30, 1948, can be found at the Private Papers section of the National Archives. The terrible irony was that the National Archives had the proper equipment for preserving those documents but, as Mr. Hasan discovered, the equipment – like the collections – was gathering dust. Mr. Hasan has since begun to take action, instituting a two-pronged program for mass preservation of materials. First, the National Archives has hired and trained around 130 individuals to repair and rebind documents, many of which were still being held together by methods of stitching that date from the 19th century. Secondly, Mr. Hasan has presided over a major effort to scan and microfilm some of the National Archives’ oldest holdings. So far, more than 225,000 pages have been digitized — including Persian and Arabic manuscripts, early East India Company correspondence, and rare maps. Mr. Hasan also had some success in expanding the documents available at the National Archives. Beginning in the 1950s, many government ministries had simply stopped sending the National Archives their old files, resulting in a dearth of historical material for the post-independence period. To date, Mr. Hasan has cajoled these ministries into relinquishing around 600,000 old documents. Every few weeks, a rickety tempo, groaning under the weight of disheveled stacks of papers, arrives from a ministry warehouse and literally dumps a few more years of Indian history at the front door. Scholars can now work with material all the way up through the Emergency of 1975-77. Manpreet Romana for The New York Times An employee at the National Archives scans a map of Bengal from 1841, as part of the digitization initiative at the National Archives. “It is amazing how things have changed in the past two years,” mentioned Alexander Lee, a doctoral candidate from Stanford. “You can actually write a post-independence history of India now, or at least the beginnings of one.” Manpreet Romana for The New York Times Research scholars study from restored materials in the reading room of the National Archives of India. Scholarly reception to Mr. Hasan’s tenure has been generally positive. Professors and graduate students have benefited from improved working conditions, quicker turnaround for photocopying and scanning, and decreased bureaucracy and red tape. Several national and international conferences have recently been held and the National Archives has created special resource centers for Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. The Archives also has plans to build an auditorium and hostel for scholars and, eventually, a new structure to replace its rundown main wing, which has a leaking roof and broken windows. But, given several political obstacles, there is only so much that Mr. Hasan and the institution can do. “It is unfortunate that Mr. Hasan does not have a greater level of control that extends to the selection of personnel,” noted one scholar from a university in California, who asked not to be named. “The National Archives cannot function effectively as an institution beholden to bureaucratic culture, public sector working habits, and a custodial mentality that hinders research instead of facilitating it.” Manpreet Romana for The New York Times An employee removes historical documents from the old storage facility at the Private Papers section of the National Archives. Mr. Hasan is himself careful to check his optimism about the state of India’s libraries and archives. While a few institutions are now capable of taking better care of their holdings, he observes, Western academic institutions and museums continue to acquire valuable collections of records, books, and artifacts from Indians who place greater value on immediate monetary gain. In spite of support from the current secretary in the Ministry of Culture, the Indian government still woefully underfu _______________________________________________ assam mailing list assam@assamnet.org http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
