Abstract
The IAWS Archives will preserve, conserve and make accessible records of its own past history including probing into absences and silences and retrieving lost, scattered and dispersed material; further, it will put in place methods and processes to document and subsequently archive its ongoing activities and developments. Finally, it will also create and archive new material on themes at the interface of the history of the womenâs studies movement and the womenâs movement in India.
A Personal Prelude
In 1999, just back from a visit to northeastern India, I dropped in at the Centre for Womenâs Development Studies (CWDS), New Delhi. Like most womenâs organisations, CWDS was an open house frequented for its well-stocked library, stimulating conversations and refreshing lemon tea! Over a shared lunch, the talk turned to the next conference of the Indian Association for Womenâs Studies (IAWS) in Hyderabad in January 2000. My work, as an independent action-researcher, in the area of gender, science and natural resource-based livelihoods seemed somewhat tangential to the prevailing womenâs studies agenda. Nevertheless, Narayan Banerjee (who looked after CWDSâ field project in Bankura, Bengal) and I decided to jointly coordinate a subtheme on gender and community forest rights, inviting both academic papers and activist presentations. That drew tremendous response and after that I became increasingly more involved with IAWS. In October 2005, as a member of the recently elected executive committee (EC), I was persuaded to accept the responsibility of President, with the support of many senior members in the team and Mary John as General Secretary. Neither Mary nor I had served on the EC before and we did not know what we were in for. That very evening I found out!
After the formal handing over in Delhi, outgoing General Secretary Veena Poonacha asked me casually, âSo where should I send the six steel cupboards and other stuffâ? It was astounding to learn that the material history of IAWS (books, papers, vouchers, etc.) were stored in these cupboards, a large yellow bag and sundry cardboard boxes, that were meticulously moved at considerable expense by train or truck, in recent years from Hyderabad to Deonar, Mumbai, and then across the city to Juhu, Mumbai! This did not seem feasible anymore. Where could we accommodate all this stuff, how expensive would it be to move? After a sleepless night, the next morning I requested Veena, then Director of the Research Centre for Womenâs Studies (RCWS, SNDT Womenâs University, Mumbai), to hold everything till we figured out what to do.
Back in Bengaluru, just as I entered our front door and put my suitcase down, I realised that my husband was unwell; this was a shock because he had been in good health after major heart surgery a decade ago. We rushed to the hospital where he was admitted to the cardiac emergency. As I sat outside the CCU, Veenaâs question kept popping up in my mind, and it was in that unlikely setting that the plan for the IAWS Archives began to take shape.
The First Phase
An institutional archives is a collective reference, providing continuity with the past and reflecting the complex ways in which an organisation is shaped over the years (Krishna, 2008). Amazingly, despite the problems of a roving secretariat, year-after-year successive ECs had maintained and passed on files and other materials. The need for an IAWS Archives had been talked about earlier. In 2002, Vidyut Bhagwat and Sharmila Rege had edited the collection, Twenty years of the IAWS, which included Kalpana Kannabiranâs (2002) collation of the presidentsâ addresses to nine conferences from 1981 (Madhuri Shah) to 2000 (Vina Mazumdar). With the 25th anniversary coming up, it seemed to me that this was the ideal moment to systematically start archiving the IAWS journey. Clearly, the very first task was to sort through and make an inventory of the material in the steel cupboards, keeping what was of archival interest and distributing or discarding the rest. The archives would have to be physically located in a womenâs organisation or an academic institution where it would be safe and accessible. I was excited about this personally and thought it would be a wonderful project for our members in the run-up to the Silver Jubilee Conference.
Under the terms of our major grant, the previous EC had agreed to have some permanent presence in Delhi. This was mainly for practical and financial reasonsâthe bank accounts, the auditor and so on were located in the national capital. But at the last General Body meeting in Goa in 2005, many IAWS members (including myself) had argued that the diverse and plural national character of IAWS would change with a permanent secretariat; the apprehension was that Delhi-based members tend to take control of everything (Dilliwale sab kabza kar lete hain).
Our plan, therefore, was for the roving secretariat to continue, moving with each new secretary and for a financial secretariat to be located in Delhi. This would be in keeping both with the concerns of the general body and the terms of the grant. The financial secretariat could hold the financial documents (required to be preserved by law) that were scattered at various locations including the back of Chhaya Datarâs garage in Mumbai! The IAWS Archives could then be located in the western region, where IAWS has a substantial membership. Through the years, CWDS had often provided an umbrella to IAWS and readily agreed to house the financial secretariat; Director Narayan Banerjee carved out a tiny space for us in their already cramped offices. The next step was to decide on a location for the IAWS Archives in the western region.
In 2006, I called a consultative meeting at Aalochana, Pune, attended by invited IAWS life and institutional members from the universities of Amravati, Aurangabad, Mumbai, Pune and SNDT, womenâs groups such as the Maharashtra Stree Abhiyas Vyaspeeth, besides EC members. The consensus was that the most feasible location would be at RCWS in SNDT Womenâs University, Mumbai. SNDT was the first university in the country to start a womenâs studies centre. It was also where IAWS had been launched a quarter century earlier. (And, of course, those six cumbersome steel cupboards were currently housed there!) The university gave its consent and space within RCWS was demarcated. So, on 14 March 2007, the IAWS Archives at RCWS, SNDT Womenâs University, Mumbai, was inaugurated by Vina Mazumdar in the presence of Neera Desai, Maithreyi Krishnaraj and other doyens of the womenâs studies movement.
Archiving Womenâs Lives
The story of the IAWS Archives is a part of a larger vision of retrieving, documenting and archiving womenâs lives (IAWS 2008a, 2008b). Realising that feminist perspectives have transformed the conventional understanding of archives, even as documentation technologies have undergone fundamental changes, one of our early tasks was to bring scholars, practitioners and technical experts together to discuss this. In January 2007, an IAWS Western Regional Workshop, âArchiving Womenâs Lives: Perspectives and Techniquesâ, was organised in collaboration with the Department of Sociology, University of Mumbai. Academics from different disciplines joined artists, film makers and professionals with expertise in archiving, documentation, digital and film technology. The workshop focused on how to address the gender biases in historical accounts, recover and privilege alternative sources, and make use of the new technologies. An important part of the workshop was the CWDSâ visual documentary exhibition, âRe-presenting Indian Women 1875â1947â (curated by Malavika Karlekar with Leela Kasturi and Indrani Majumdar) that was brought from Delhi to Mumbai. The archival photographs of womenâin the family, women learning, at work and in the freedom struggleâdrew the attention of many young students. For us, these formal and informal interactions underlined the importance of using varied means of documentation to recover different stories, of networking and reaching out to different groups.
Kamala Ganesh, our Joint Secretary, who had coordinated the archiving workshop in Mumbai, volunteered (despite having recently recovered from cancer treatment) to oversee the arduous process of sorting through the stuff in the steel cupboards, the large yellow bag and cardboard boxes. I undertook the responsibility of collecting the published materials, books, speeches, newsletters etc., and having these digitised. As both of us discovered, the experience was fascinating but much more difficult and time consuming than we had imagined. CWDS too was taken aback to find how much space the financial documents requiredâthe cardboard boxes that arrived from Mumbai were all over their lobby for a while till room could be found in the basement.
The Physical Archives
In the first phase before the Silver Jubilee Conference, Kamala, assisted by Unnati Tripathi, sorted through the materials to prepare a detailed inventory. The aim was to reduce the sheer volume by identifying what needed to be kept and what could be discarded. The EC decided to hold not more than five copies of each published document and distribute the rest to womenâs studies centres. The unpublished âgrey literatureâ comprised mainly of routine correspondence, abstracts of conference papers, rejected paper proposals, drafts of publications and so on; much of this was discarded. A selection of letters was retained because of their interesting content or to provide an insight into the changing timesâfrom handwritten postcards to typed notes, from cyclostyled sheets to computer printouts. Kamala prepared a detailed inventory of the documents that were retained or discarded. The voluminous material was successfully reduced to two steel cupboards!
Writing about this exercise for the Silver Jubilee publication Anchoring Womenâs Studies, Kamala Ganesh (2008, IAWS, 2008c) noted certain key features: The material reflected the organisationâs feminist principles, its âaustere purpose with a human touchâ, and a concern for accountability. As the membership had changed and grown in 25 years (from 271 at Trivandrum in 1984 to over 1,500), the logistics of organising a conference had become overwhelming and made up the bulk of the grey literature. She writes:
The rich material provides glimpses of the organisational, personal and interpersonal dimensions of the IAWS that played a role in the way the academic agenda and activities developed. To some extent, one can track the course of the womenâs studies movement in India in its formative phase, since many members were also leading figures in the field. Popular themes and approaches for research, the quality of papers, and the nature of participation in the conferences over the years can be analysed, as also the issues taken up for resolutions and advocacy, and the internal debates that went into them. ⌠Furthermore, in contrast to the individual member, who reacts to the organisation through her personal experience of it, the cumulative picture that comes through is one of office bearers taking considerable pains to run the organisation as well as to lead it. (pp. 29â30)
She also draws attention to âan easy and unselfconscious transition between personal and professional matters and issuesâ. For instance,
The EC correspondence is scattered with references to shifting house, childrenâs and other family illnesses, and conjunctivitis and laryngitis of EC members! Past President Nirmala Banerjeeâs letter to a pregnant General Secretary Kalpana Kannabiran on the eve of the Hyderabad conference asking her to take care and mentioning her own impending cataract operation highlights not only the generational sweep in the composition of the office bearers but also the very pressing personal happenings in the midst of serious conferencing, the impossibility for women of having a neat separation and perhaps even its undesirability. (p. 32)
The Digital Archives
In 2007, I was a nearly 60-year-old digital novice; my digital experience till then was confined to e-mails, and setting up and moderating e-groups, including one for members of the IAWS Executive Committee. My first digital project was creating a CD of the IAWS Southern Regional Workshop (February 2007), âThe Struggle to Transform Disciplinesâ. The CD put together with the technical help of the Centre for Education and Documentation (CED), Bengaluru, included presented papers, PPTs, photographs, a photo-montage and video clip, reports from other regional workshops and information on IAWS. This was later distributed to all the participants.
This exercise provided the confidence to go ahead with digitising all the IAWS publications, again with technical support from CED, Bengaluru. The process of identification, collection, collation and digitising took many months. In the early years before commercial publishers discovered gender/womenâs studies, the Association itself had published significant works, most of which were only available as single copies; there were a quarter century of newsletters, besides office bearersâ reports to the previous 11 national conferences, the IAWS constitution and selected photographs. These materials were scattered across the country with individual members and former office bearers, or in libraries. Kalpana Kannabiran (Hyderabad), Chhaya Datar and Veena Poonacha (Mumbai) shared materials generously; others hesitated to send precious original documents to Bengaluru but sent photocopies instead. My obsession with getting the full set of newsletters led to some teasing from my colleagues, because no meeting began without my mentioning IAWS Newsletter No. 6 presumed to have been issued from Barodaâit continues to remain elusive!
Due to cost, time and other constraints we decided not to digitise membership lists, because of privacy concerns, conference abstracts which were far too many, and conference papers because the sets were incomplete. In the first phase, we scanned about 110 documents, including 20 publications and over 40 newsletters, covering the period from 1983 to 2007. It was only after 2010 that IAWS together with RCWS began the process of digitising the âgrey literatureâ such as correspondence and financial balance sheets.
The IAWS Archives CD
The process of digitising, as I slowly learnt, was not simply that of putting a document under the scanner. I had to study the pros and cons of the various file and image formats before choosing the image PDF format, which maintains the characteristics of the original document. The IAWS Silver Jubilee Archives CD was released at the XIIth National Conference, Lucknow, on 7 February 2008. Designed as a self-sustaining venture, it was priced at Rs 100 and we soon ran out of copies. Of course, if we were to undertake this project today we would opt for pen drives instead of CDs.
The intention was to eventually have the digital material available on the IAWS website. So the CD too had a web format with hyperlinks that connect different files. A small start was also made to set up an open access IAWS Web Archives drawing upon the material published in the Archives CD. Enhancing and supplementing this is a continuing task that requires archival and design expertise and funding.
The IAWS Archives project with the attractive CD was a key factor that enabled us to negotiate a five-year grant from the Ford Foundation in 2008 to cover IAWS activities including the ongoing work on the archives. The Archives has been visited by scholars and students researching the growth of womenâs studies in India.
The Second Phase
It took a couple of years before the working arrangement between IAWS and RCWS, SNDT Womenâs University could be legally formalised. In December 2010, an initial Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) was signed between IAWS represented by the General Secretary Samita Sen and RCWS, SNDT Womenâs University, represented by RCWS Director Veena Poonacha. In August 2011, the Memorandum was formally reaffirmed, signed by IAWS President Anita Ghai and the Registrar of SNDT Womenâs University.
In the meanwhile, RCWS had received a substantial donation under the late Avabai Wadiaâs will to set up the Avabai Wadia Archives (AWA) to document the lives of women. The Memorandum clarifies the roles and responsibilities of IAWS and AWA. It states:
The IAWS Archives is being established under this agreement between the two collaborating institutions, IAWS and RCWS. Under the terms of the agreement the RCWS will provide and maintain the space, and minimum maintenance of the collection. It will also provide expertise in archiving through the RCWS Archives (AWA) and Documentation Centre. The IAWS Archives and the AWA archives will have distinct identities and will make no financial commitment to each other. The IAWS collection cannot be merged with the RCWS archives and documentation collection or with the University Library or with any other body of the University without the permission of the IAWS Executive Committee. The RCWS holds the IAWS Archives Collection in trust and will ensure routine maintenance. RCWS will also facilitate the development of the archives without any financial commitment. The IAWS will be responsible for transferring material, including correspondence, materials, and conference related papers to the RCWS on a regular basis. It will also be responsible for the overall functioning of the IAWS Archives and will bear the financial costs of its activities.
Management Committee
An IAWS Archives Committee set up by the EC had been functioning since 2006. Under the terms of the MoA, this was reconstituted in 2010 as a Core Management Committee (CMC). It included four IAWS life members; two representatives of the EC, one of whom would serve as the convenor of the committee; and the Director of RCWS as an ex-officio member. The CMC had a term of five years (unlike the three-year term of the IAWS EC).
In collaboration with AWA, two workshops were held at RCWS, in 2011 and 2013, on the challenges of feminist archiving. Archiving work in Mumbai progressed, as Unnati Tripathi and RCWS (guided by Kamala and Veena) undertook the classification, cataloguing and digitising of some of the grey literature, such as minutes of meetings, conference proceedings and other materials that had been acquired. With the guidance of Director Indu Agnihotri, CWDS also digitised the fragile documents from the Indian womenâs movement conferences stored in its library collection.
Video Documentation
With the strong base established in the first phase of archiving, IAWS ventured into video documentation of workshops and conferences, under the leadership of Uma Chakravarty who headed the CMC. A regional workshop on âCultural Production of the Womenâs Movement in Indiaâ was held in collaboration with Indraprastha College for Women, Delhi, which itself had many years earlier established its own archives on higher education for women. A selection of audioâvisual recordings from the workshop covers 30 years of cultural production relating to the womenâs movement.
Subsequently, the proceedings of the IAWS National Conferences at Wardha (2011), and Guwahati (2014) were videographed (by Uma and Paloma, respectively). These form a unique record of alternative forms of recording womenâs lives. The Wardha conference, for instance, included sessions such as the Chhatisgarh Tribal Artistsâ Workshop on Gond painting, a mono-act on the struggle of Irom Sharmila in Manipur and a pre-conference workshop that captured the voices of university students from across India on womenâs studies scholarship and activism.
Oral Narratives
Feminist critiques had long emphasised the need to go beyond conventional archival sources to recover the voices of the marginalised, through retrieving informal documents like posters and pamphlets and by recording womenâs oral narratives and stories of resistance to patriarchy. Feminist publishing and audioâvisual documentation in India had drawn attention to the range of âsourcesâ that needed to be explored. In keeping with the threefold objectives of the IAWS Archives (aforementioned epigraph), during 2011â2012 the CMC initiated projects to âcreate and archive new material on themes at the interface of the history of womenâs studies and the womenâs movement in Indiaâ.
The first of these projects was to interview women activists of the 1970s and early 1980s, a time when many ânew social movementsâ had emerged and questions about the direction of the nation-state had been raised. Ponni Arasu (guided by Uma and Mary) recorded interviews with pioneering women and collected historic photographs, pamphlets and other documents from them. Among those interviewed were the following: Southern regionâGita Ramakrishnan, Vasanth Kannabiran, Mythili Sivaraman, Nalini Nayak, Fatima Burnad and Saraswathi Rajendran; Northern regionâManimala, Nandita Haksar, Shah Jehan Apa, Vina Mazumdar and Nandana Reddy; Western regionâUrmila Pawar, Shiraz Bulsara, Sujata Gothoskar, Kumud Pawde and Gail Omvedt (who also donated 400 photographs of three decades of her work in Maharashtra).
A project envisaged by J. Devika as âa snowballing preliminary archivesâ was on âFeminism before and after the Fourth National Conference of the Indian Womenâs Movementsâ. The conference, held at Kozhikode (Calicut) in December 1990 was critical in understanding the history and perceptions of feminism in Kerala at that time. Recorded interviews and discussions with key organisers and participants (such as K. Ajitha, Sara Joseph and others) were complimented by collecting relevant materials in Malayalam and Englishâconference reports, newspaper and journal articles and so on.
In 2014, despite a difficult funding situation, we went ahead with two significant oral narrative projects. One of these is Ilina Senâs project to interview key participants of the Nari Mukti Sangharsh Sammelan, held in Patna in 1988. The Patna Conference had brought to the fore the voices of women in peopleâs struggles and mass organisations in a hitherto unprecedented manner. Indeed, this inspiring example preceded the Calicut conference and other conferences organised by the autonomous womenâs movement. It is also unique because later conferences have not had this kind of representation.
The other is Anita Ghaiâs project on the interface (or lack thereof) between the womenâs movement and the disabled womenâs struggle through interviews with representatives of both. Although âwomenâs bodiesâ are intrinsic to feminist perspectives, women with disability have been excluded from both the womenâs movement and womenâs studies. Anita suggests that beyond acknowledging exclusion, there is need to articulate and understand the perceptions of feminist activists that led to this. Are there any common threads in the narratives of women who interrogated patriarchy but did not âseeâ disabled women? Could the articulation and analysis of these narratives lead to a surer path towards a socially just womenâs movement?
Moving Forward
We may no longer be carting steel cupboards, bags and boxes across the country but the digital era makes archiving both easier and more difficult. Immediately after our EC took over in 2005 we had set up an e-group to communicate among EC members. This has continued to serve the invaluable purpose of linking EC members in far flung cities and is a digital record of internal correspondence and discussion (including, no doubt, some angry exchanges!). This vast amount of âgrey literatureâ already in the digital space needs to be organised and perhaps selectively made accessible to future researchers. This has not happened partly because of lack of funding and partly because the nitty-gritty of archiving is laborious, backroom work, requiring considerable patience and persistence to yield small nuggets.
Using newer documentary technologies and recovering oral histories is invigorating but this too requires focus and organisation. The priorities for future oral narrative projects of the IAWS Archives, as outlined in September 2014, are (a) history of the womenâs movement, (b) role of women in struggles and other movements/womenâs linkages with other movements and struggles, (c) womenâs struggles with larger movements, (d) womenâs involvement with the health movement and (e) womenâs studies. The functioning of the IAWS Archives and its objectives and priorities were discussed and reaffirmed by the IAWS EC and present and past members of the archives committee at a meeting in 2017 at Mumbai.
The process of archiving the IAWS journey has not been smooth. It has involved retrieving that which has been scattered or lost and âprobing into absences and silencesâ, devising methods to document and subsequently archive womenâs changing lives, and creating new materials at the juncture of womenâs studies and the womenâs movement. It has meant selecting and sifting through all kinds of oral and written records that are often interwoven in complex ways. Personal and collective narratives are open to varied interpretations, reflecting the politics of the past and the present. The Archives show that as a professional association, IAWS has consistently striven to institutionalise the critical concerns of the womenâs movement, straddling the space between womenâs democratic resistance and academic structures. This endeavour is fraught with obstacles and challenges. Archiving the IAWS journey serves as a touchstone and a guide to the ways in which two generations of women have faced and overcome these challenges.
Thanks to Kamala Ganesh, Veena Poonacha and Samita Sen.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This is a slightly revised and updated version of my article with the same title published in Women in a Changing World: Restructured Inequalities, Countercurrents and Sites of Resistance, edited by Indu Agnihotri and Meera Velayudhan, and issued at the XV National Conference on Womenâs Studies, the Indian Association for Womenâs Studies, Chennai, January, 2017.