A day-long international conference Limits of Archives: Mapping Urban Spaces in Modern South Asia being organized at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta on 31st January, 2020. The event would feature presentations on how archival practices focused on urban spaces have sought to use new technologies and modalities of record-keeping to build new material infrastructure for archives, and to address the critical question of the ethical imperative. Our participants would draw on their historical and anthropological research on urban formations in South Asia such as Jaipur, Karachi, Kolkata, and Thane to reflect on how their respective projects have pushed the limits of urban studies and on the methodological challenges they have faced in seeking to understand cities and suburban formations.

Modern cities and urban spaces have set unique challenges to archivists and archival practices globally. Archivists, in response, have reimagined their institutional mandates, articulated new categories, reconfigured their own internal hierarchies, learned methodologically from quotidian urban practices such as flânerie to understand and map urban formations. Engagements with archives have led to the articulation of new categories and such categories have critically informed the way we look at cities and suburban spaces. Archives thus underpin both modes of surveillance and resistance, and the agenda of research and agitation. However, self-reflexive archivists are acutely aware of the limits of their explanatory powers and this sense of lack has often pushed them to redesign the very material infrastructure of archives, and legislate new institutional norms of use and access. Consequently, these redefinitions have led archivists to engage with newer technologies and the emergent legal regimes that seek to govern them. Here, the local context comes to critically define an otherwise global phenomenon, and the registers of identitarian differences such as race, caste, gender, and class inflect and play on these processes.   

In this day-long international conference on the Limits of Archives: Mapping Urban Spaces in Modern South Asia, we seek to engage with some of the questions that have been outlined above. Our participants would draw on their historical and anthropological research on urban formations in South Asia such as Jaipur, Karachi, Kolkata, and Thane to reflect on how their respective projects have pushed the limits of urban studies and on the methodological challenges they have faced in seeking to understand cities and suburban formations. The event would also feature presentations on how archival practices focused on urban spaces have sought to use new technologies and modalities of record-keeping to build new material infrastructure for archives, and to address the critical question of the ethical imperative.

Limits of Archives: Mapping Urban Spaces in Modern South Asia

One-Day International Conference
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta

10.30 am – 10.40 am: Welcome Address: Rosinka Chaudhuri, Director, CSSSC

10.40 am – 10.50 am: Introductory Remarks: Rajarshi Ghose, CSSSC

TEA

11.00 am – 12.10 pm: Panel 1

Documenting Urban Spaces
Chair: Manabi Majumdar, CSSSC

  • Laura A. Ring, University of Chicago: The Politics of Documentation: Thinking Beyond Conflict in Karachi
  • Priya Sangameswaran, CSSSC: Unraveling the Bundle of Urban Property Rights: Multiple Claim(ant)s from a Mortgage in Thane

12:20 pm – 13.30 pm: Panel 2

Cities and the Question of Belonging
Chair: Tapati Guha-Thakurta, CSSSC

  • Garima Dhabhai, Presidency University: Imaginations of Heritage: Collectors and Chroniclers of Jaipur 
  • Zaid Al Baset, St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous): Performing Class, Inhabiting Religion: Middle Class Belonging in Contemporary Kolkata

13.30 pm – 14.30 pm: LUNCH

14.30 pm – 15.40 pm: Panel 3

Reimagination of Archival Practices
Chair: Rosinka Chaudhuri, CSSSC

  • Sudeshna Banerjee, Jadavpur University: Archiving Kolkata Differently: How different is it, really!
  • Abhijit Gupta, Jadavpur University: Print into Digital: Gains and Losses

15.40 pm – 16.20 pm: Presentation

Archival Imperatives – what we record and what we don’t: Notes on the CSSSC Archive and Endangered Archives Program, British Library collaborations
Chair: Debdatta Chowdhury

  • Rajarshi Ghose, CSSSC and Tapan Paul, CSSSC

16.20 pm – 16.30 pm: TEA

16.30 pm – 17.30 pm: Panel Discussion
Challenges of “Open Access”: Reflections on the South Asia Materials Project, South Asia Open Archives, and the CSSSC Archive

Chair: Prachi Deshpande, CSSSC

Panelists:

  • Ellen Ambrosone, Princeton University
  • Abhijit Bhattacharya, CSSSC
  • Laura A. Ring, University of Chicago
  • Mara Thacker, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

17:30 pm – 17:35 pm: Vote of Thanks