Decolonizing Digital Dialogues: How New Archival Practices are Transforming the Art, Culture and Heritage of India

Abstract

The internet and digital infrastructure have had a profound impact on how archives are created and accessed. This shift in the status of the archive is especially relevant in the postcolonial context. This article discusses three digital projects, namely, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Journeys, Poorvanchal aur Palayan: Transversing Migration Narratives and Rage Against the Archive, as sites of decolonial knowledge production. Each of these case studies uses digital technology in unique ways to function as a dialogic mode of interrogation, intervention and interpretation. The selected projects reflect an artistic and scholarly trend in the field of art, culture and heritage in India, contesting colonial epistemological dominance and contextualizing the colonial past, archival memory and migration history in India. The study illustrates both the impact and limitations of these projects through the application of ideas from archival history, subaltern studies, postcolonial theory and digital humanities. The findings of this study can be useful for future scholarship on digital archiving, practitioners working with community-based archival models and institutions dealing with colonial archives.