Archiving through personal records with an interface like Facebook has made old worlds come alive.
By Deepika Sorabjee
Economic Times - 2 May, 2012

Link to the article in Economic Times:
http://bit.ly/IS06Pp

My attention-deficit ways haven't stopped me from clicking - and very religiously - on each new post in two of my favourite Facebook pages.

The Rare Book Society of India (RBSI) brings digitised rare books, sculpture and monuments from the first century A.D. Rajput and Mughal paintings from the 16th century AD to Company paintings from the Colonial period. There are even posts on people and historical events. The Indian Memory Project (IMP) is more personal - old photographs contributed by people of their friends and family.

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."

"Awareness had to be created about rare books in our country in a small but consistent way," felt Yadalam. Today his consistency has paid off in a bigger way: the RBSI page is viewed in 54 countries - almost 4,000 members visit the page 3 times a day and the page clocks around 1.5 million post views a month.

EXPANDING SCOPE

In fact, I was among the first fifty to "like" his Facebook page started in October 2009. Since then RBSI's "followers" are a loyal and erudite bunch of over 14,500 members. Yadalam replied within days of my request for posts on Mahabaleshwar, a hill station near Mumbai, by coming up with two photographs: a view which led to a guessing game of which "point" it was from and another of strawberrywalas which led to a history of strawberry growing started by Chinese prisoners interned there by the British.

"The greatest delight for me as the founder of RBSI is the many things it has evolved itself into: It's a rare book society, a history club, a portal for amateur historians, serious academics and writers, a forum that has connected so many like-minded people," says Yadalam.

Both Yadav and Yadalam began with Facebook pages, and both are expanding to websites as they have grown. "The Facebook page was easier to manage. But after a while I found it limiting as the format does not offer itself to a wider audience. It is a great place to create knowledge of a product, service, or person and network. But it is not a place to run an online archive," she says.

- Deepika Sorabjee, the author, trained as a doctor, is now retraining as an art conservationist.