14 August,2011 08:15 AM IST | | Paromita Vohra
I once went to an exhibition on the history of Indian women in photos. Old pictures are always fascinating, poised as they are in a bittersweet way, between life and death, their still surfaces belying the unasked questions, untold secrets and remedies, unknowable desires, resentments and triumphs that surged just a moment before the image came into being.
Yadav's mother Shalini (middle,bottom) and her 5 aunts (clockwise from
top left) Kusum, Madhavi, Suman, Nalini and Aruna; Agra, 1961-1971. It
was a custom for women to be photographed to prove that they were
educated. courtesy: ndianmemoryproject. wordpress.com
Walking through that exhibition, I naturally felt some of the fascination for history brought alive by these women freedom fighters, poets, and the occasional actress. But I also felt an odd alienation, as if the history of history books, had here perhaps, acquired a few missing pages. But, feminist or not, I could not draw the line from my life to those lives, even though I knew in theory that the two are of course, connected. I could not see the smaller achievements and failures and endeavours of everyday life reflected in those pictures. I did not know what section, say my grandmother, small-time actress, divorcee and owner of exquisite saris might fit into.
And maybe that will always be the limitation of certain ways of narrating history -- no one version is ever enough, for it draws the boundary of its perspective around its telling. Then last year, I discovered The Indian Memory Project, an amazing online initiative by photographer Anusha Yadav. It's one of those simple, miraculous ideas that you wish you had come by first. A website, to which anyone can contribute a photograph along with a write-up on the picture -- who's in it, when, why and how it was taken, why it matters to the contributor.
Most of us are anxious about donating our photographs or much-valued collection of recipes from Eve's Weekly or really old issues of Junior Statesman and other such matter of nostalgia, memory and record. We want to share it with the world but we can't quite bear to give it away; why would we have saved it so lovingly if it was so easy to not have it after all? Also, often, our personal archives don't seem equal to the grandiose claims of history. But an online archive like this makes those hesitations irrelevant, because we can share the picture, and still have the supposed original with us. We can explain why we value something, without overstating its significance, and give others a way into our world.
The Indian Memory Project has both, the typical and atypical delights of an archive that people contribute to without much agenda. The notes display a sense of history, fun, pride, attachment, anthropology, sociology, love, humour, wonder. It is a moving journey through what people thought was worth recording about their lives, as well as what others have held on to as a story of the past.
The six sisters of the Sixties from Agra in their graduation gowns; goras with their hunting parties; the first ever picture taken in a Pandit village of Kashmir, featuring a huge family, where the sender details the difference between head dress across generations; a 1920s picture of a Tamilian couple, the wife wearing a nine-yard sari and a pair of Mary Jane shoes with socks; a tie-dye bedecked couple at a beach disco in the 1970s; Brigadier Gyan Singh with Nehru and Tenzing Norgay; family portraits from Lahore, Kanpur and Calcutta.
The archive is more than a photo album of South Asia. It's an entire history of competing and complementary versions of life in our parts -- one to which anyone can add their two bits or six, a movie in which everyone can find a role.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at ww.parodevi.com.
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.
