Traces of South Asia: Curating the Gaps

This guest blog by Daniel Payne is one of a number of blogs produced by The Inclusive Cataloguing Group, which is one of three special interest groups in the ARA Diversity and Inclusion Allies. The allies are a group volunteers who organise around the principles of improving diversity and inclusion across ARA and the wider record-keeping community. All allies are welcome to join this group, as well as the other two groups: Accessibility and Approaching Marginalised Communities.

Traces of South Asia: Curating the Gaps

The British Library of Political and Economic Science (LSE Library) was founded in 1896 and houses many interesting collections, including The Women’s Library. I come from a librarian rather than an archival or history background, and my role at LSE Library as curator of the politics collections focuses on generating engagement with our archives and special collections. Recently I’ve been thinking critically about the way we present our collections beyond the catalogue and this post explores a project I’ve been working on as a result of this thinking.

Flagship Collections

The RLUK report Unique and Distinctive Collections: Opportunities for Research Libraries introduced a framework for identifying Unique and Distinctive Collections (UDCs) which are defined in the report as:

“A collection that, regardless of format or location within an institution, derives significance from its interest to research, teaching or society through its association with a person, place or topic, such as to distinguish the constituent items from similar items which may exist elsewhere’”.

Alongside other literature, colleagues at LSE used this report to inform an analysis of our collections to identify what we termed “flagship” collections. These flagship collections would be sites to focus our archive engagement and development work around – see our “Collections Highlights” pages.

What gets excluded when we “flagship” our collections?

Our archives focus on late 19th century to present day and covers British political and economic history as well as the development of social sciences in Britain and the history of LSE. As such, our flagship collections are centred around Britain. This centring, at least at first glance, gives the impression that there is not much material that relates to non-British activities.

As I write this it reminds me of a familiar complaint we sometimes receive from the Reading Room. A researcher, rifling through the files they’ve just requested, will ask: “Why have you organised these photographs by date? Wouldn’t it be better to organise them by location?” They might ask this because their research focuses on the locations of the photographs, where the dates don’t matter so much to them. This is part and parcel of the work of the researcher, who must always do some work of decentring when engaging in research.  

Archives must be centred in order for them to be discoverable.  But this leaves me wondering – who is it we are asking to do more of the work of decentring, when we make the choice to centre them in this way. Is that choice a replication of coloniality?

Ambedkar

The 70th anniversary of independence in India and Pakistan prompted me to have a look in our archives for material relating to this, and I was very surprised to discover that we have an enormous amount of material across many different collections. Working with the LSE South Asia Centre, we curated an exhibition together that explored independence in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. This work and conversations with Dr. Nilanjan Sarkar at the LSE South Asia Centre led me to discover Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, affectionately known as “Babasaheb” (“Respected Father”).

Born in 1891 in India to a poor family belonging to a Dalit community (pejoratively referred to at that time as “Untouchables”; considered to be the lowest of the social hierarchy and outside of the Hindu caste system), he faced extreme discrimination and segregation throughout his life (see our online exhibition Educate. Agitate. Organise)

Despite his enormous significance as well as his connection to the LSE, we only had a few traces in the archives. People and communities inspired by the life and work of Ambedkar regularly get in touch with me about him, and there is sadly not much to show about his time here. As well as the scattering of these collections, there are also gaps.  

Traces of South Asia

Whereas our flagship collections seem distinct in their remit, the South Asia collections are not. They are scattered; they are obscured; there are gaps. To confront this problem we created a webpage called Traces of South Asia, which would act as a dynamic collections highlights page to focus our activities in raising the profile of these collections.

Although in its early stages this has been a fruitful project so far. Remembering that archive catalogues often reproduce the original terms found in archives, I searched for the word “untouchable”. This sent me down a very long winded path where I discovered previously unknown letters written by Ambedkar; providing evidence of Ambedkar’s activities organising scholarships for Dalit students to study at LSE. We’ve also organised interesting public talks such as how to deal with fragmentary archives and narratives in South Asia, used blog posts to speak about independence in Bangladesh, and my colleague Dr Gillian Murphy brings to light the Myra Sadd Brown Memorial Library, which is not something that had previously been flagged as a collection in itself. I’ve also contributed to a book chapter about Ambedkar’s time spent in London, and we’re planning more events next term.

Next steps

Partnership should always be at the heart of activities like this. My next steps are to work with students and other community groups to help share their work on the Traces of South Asia page. I’d love to find ways for students interested in learning about archives and South Asia to use this project as a way for them to get practical experience and to pay them for their labour. Many of the visitors that come to our Reading Room use our collections and then we never hear from them again, and I think there is potential to use this project to help share the work of our visitors. I’m working on a digitisation proposal to digitise some of the South Asia collections, and I’m interested in producing oral histories as a way to address some of the gaps.

I would love to hear from anyone that had any thoughts prompted from this blog, or any suggestions for further work in the area – please get in touch.