ICAS:MP’s ‘Archive of the Political’ (AoP)
We encourage all thematic modules to work towards digitizing endangered collections or source material coming out of research projects conducted under ICAS:MP’s thematic framework. We aim to make the collections accessible, subject to copyright permission.
Presently, the following archives are available online:
Thematic Module 3 (TM3) ‘Critiques and Renewals of Democracy’
‘Democracy Archive’, comprising three collections, has been created under the guidance of the module coordinators Professor Srirupa Roy and Professor Rupa Viswanath:
(1) Long Emergency
Project Coordinator: Professor Srirupa Roy (ICAS:MP co-director/module coordinator of TM 3 and TM 7), University of Göttingen
The Long Emergency collection was conceived as a series of oral history interviews documenting journalistic praxis around the time of the Emergency in India (1975–1977). To convey a sense of the ‘spirit of the times’, the collection also includes a selection of material such as films, cartoons, news clippings, government documents, and court judgements from this period. The oral histories collected here suggest some of the many ways in which the ‘Long Emergency’ resonates with readers and researchers today: they are shaped by retrospect—the act of recollection and reflection almost 45 years after the fact.
(2) Campus Uprisings
Project Coordinator: Professor Srirupa Roy (module coordinator of TM 3 and TM 7), University of Göttingen
The Campus Uprisings archive documents student movements in Indian universities. It is primarily a born-digital repository with immediate ramifications for present-day university politics and the wider context of national politics in India. As an archive of the contemporary, this is an evolving collection simultaneously looking back and onwards with a narrative that will continue to change as new political possibilities unfold.
(3) Documenting Domination
Project Coordinator: Professor Rupa Viswanath (module coordinator of TM 3), University of Göttingen.
Comprising political pamphlets, party and movement publications, memoirs, interviews, novels, and collections of poetry and folk music, this archive records how ideas of caste and class have shaped political organizing in the southern states of India by a range of actors with diverse political agendas. As such, this collection allows researchers to pose historically grounded questions about the politics of inherited inequality under modern democratic regimes.
Thematic Module 2 (TM2) ‘Labour as a Political Category’
Project: Labour Regulation in the Twentieth Century
Project Coordinators: Dr Anna Sailer (TM 2 member), University of Göttingen and Dr Megha Sharma.
Labour Regulation in the Long Twentieth Century is conceived as a digital repository on labour regulations in India and one of the results of TM 2 (Labour as a Political Category). The repository is also an element of a larger multilateral cooperation project that aims to create Extended Archives of Indian Labour (EAIL). The present repository of documents seeks to track these changes over the long twentieth century.
