This delightful marriage of archiving through past institutional and personal records with an interface like Facebook has made "old worlds come alive". Both Subbiah Yadalam of RBSI and Anusha Yadav of IMP know it only too well.
CHASING ONE'S PASSION
Yadav is a professional portrait photographer who founded IMP in February 2010. Though not a trained anthropologist or historian, her "emotional curiosity about people, their lives, their spaces" have led her to start IMP as "an attempt to trace the history of India, its people, professions, development, traditions, cultures, settlements and cities through pictures and oral stories found in personal family albums and archives".
Subbiah Yadalam sources pictures from the online collections of many museums around the world: "We have explicit permission to post them on the RBSI page. All the digital books are sourced from Internet Archive, Googlebooks and Project Gutenberg who have digitised probably a million books that are free of copyright and which can be downloaded for free."
A lot of physical archives are lying in utter neglect. Some are forgotten in locked rooms and some are facing government apathy. In fact, digital archives bypass all these cumbersome formalities - and conservation costs - and provide easy access to the viewer or researcher. In addition, very few archives are telling of the personal lives of Indians at a time when independence from colonial rule and nation-building dominated the print media.
Yadav feels that "India's history is far more documentative in the form of literature, fiction and non-fiction available in text, than as image based archives".
"From 15 images and stories we are now at about a 100, but there is still a lot of work to be done," says Yadav. There are images contributed by TV anchor Sreenivasan Jain, of his paternal grandparents holding hands, rather bold for their times but "turned out to be indicative of the unconventional nature their lives would take. In contributor Vani Subramaniam's picture of her grandparents, her Tamilian grandmother sits traditionally dressed except for sock clad feet in Mary Janes! There are contributions from abroad too, mainly of British grandparents in colonial bungalows.
Yadalam is from a business family and has been a book lover all his life.
A chance encounter with a 7 volume set by Edgar Thurston and Rangachari called the "Castes and Tribes of South India" at his "Club's library" led him to search for the original, and to KKS Murthys' Select Book Shop, the oldest rare book seller in Bengaluru. And RBSI was born, you could say, at that moment. The fruition on Facebook came after he realised through net searches that "though America had close to a thousand rare and antiquarian book sellers, India with its rich literary heritage of thousands of years had only a handful."
No comments:
Post a Comment