About
The Democracy Archive is an ongoing collection and curation project on the varied trajectories and changing contours of Indian democracy.
The aim is to create a repository of things that do not belong to the conventional paper archives of the modern state but serve as vital records
and even agents of democratic transformation,
e.g. "grey literature" such as pamphlets, posters, handbills; personal photos and journals, oral histories, social media posts, and various kinds of digital ephemera that have been produced in and around different movements and moments of democratic change and unrest over the past seventy years.
The Democracy Archive presently hosts three collections:
(1) Long Emergency: Oral histories of Indian journalism during and after the Emergency of 1975-77
(2) Anti-Caste Movements and Left Movements in South India: Documentary histories from 1920s-1970s
(3) Campus Uprisings: Digital archives of student protests in 2015-17
The Democracy Archive is a part of the "Metamorphoses of the Political" project of the Merian-Tagore International Centre for Advanced Study (ICAS:MP), a Germany-India international research partnership launched in 2015 with the financial support of the German Ministry of Higher Education (BMBF).
The permanent home of the archive is at the University of Göttingen's Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), a partner-institution of of ICAS:MP
CREDITS
Project Coordinators: Srirupa Roy and Rupa Viswanath
“Long Emergency” Subproject Coordinator: Kai Friese
Senior Researcher: Gajendran Ayyathurai
Senior Consultants: Kai Friese, Ayesha Kidwai
Archiving Consultant: Farah Yameen
Archiving Technical Team: Janastu (TB Dinesh, Shalini A, Bhanu Prakash G S)
Technical credits: This site is developed on Omeka, an Open-source web publishing platform for sharing digital collections, adhering to Dublin Core Vocabulary standards.