How contemporary archives are telling the history of modern India

The word archive conjures up images of pale parchment and manuscripts from a distant past, sealed and stowed away in boxes in dank rooms. Instead, imagine an ever-evolving collection of general items—circulars, letters, advertisements, sketches and drawings, stories, even chairs and spectacle cases—that trace India’s journey to the current moment. Companies, educational institutions, foundations and collectors are creating these kinds of contemporary archives that focus on histories that linger in our everyday lives, impacting our present. And through it, they’re reminding us of the paths that science, feminism, consumerism, rural movements, art, activism and cinema are taking in modern India.

An example is the Godrej Archives in Vikhroli, Mumbai, which houses everything from old safes and office chairs to locks, offering a glimpse into the growth of the company and how it mirrors changes in Indian society itself. The repository of manufacturing and technical drawings, testimonials, sales and marketing records dates back 125 years. A series of testimonies, for instance, shows that the company was one of the first recruiters at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, in the late-1960s at a time when the idea of management education was considered novel.

In Sonepat, Haryana, is Ashoka University’s Archives of Contemporary India holding over 100 collections of private papers of personalities from different fields, including former prime minister Manmohan Singh, former vice-President S. Radhakrishnan, historian Rajmohan Gandhi, actor-director-playwright Girish Karnad and filmmaker Sai Paranjpye. From correspondence, diaries and speeches to rare photographs and unpublished material, the repository is a window into India’s political, cultural, social and intellectual history. Similar archives exist elsewhere in the realms of fashion, architecture, jewellery, art, culture and history.

Each of the contemporary archives acts as blocks of a jigsaw puzzle, which come together to reveal the country’s evolution. When viewed as a collective, they tell us about factors that have influenced how we as a society think, behave and respond to the events around us. “What do we demand from history, and what do we demand from visual material?” says Rahaab Allana, curator and publisher, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation and study of India’s cultural history. “I think it's about what we make visible through collections that becomes important.”

Deepthi Sasidharan, museum professional and co-founder, Eka Cultural Resources and Research, a private advisory that has worked with institutions, businesses and individuals to archive, curate, exhibit and manage tangible and intangible culture for more than 17 years. “Anyone who collects, be it large data sets or objects—it could be anything from bird feathers and books to jewellery pieces—needs those repositories organised at some point of time,” she says. “A professional is able to bring some method to the madness using set archival standards.”

Her team has managed collections for a range of enterprises, including Tata Capital, Emami Legacy Centre, the Sarita Handa Archive, Amrapali Museum, the Tarun Tahiliani archive, Dr Savita N. Mehta Museum and Rezwan Razack Museum of Indian Paper Money.

Marking milestones

In India, the concept of a business archive is just gaining traction. Indian legacy enterprises have seen nearly eight decades of development, and many have expanded globally despite starting small. “A number of legacy businesses are hitting milestone years of 25, 50 and 75,” says Sasidharan. “They want to look back at their journey with pride. And that is where the archive plays a huge role.”

It’s a similar idea that inspired the Emami group to open the Legacy Centre at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity last year. The founders R.S. Agarwal and R.S. Goenka began discussing an Emami Legacy Centre in 2014 to mark the company’s 50th anniversary. The third generation of their families were entering the business, which had grown to a 25,000-strong workforce since 1974, and they wanted everyone, from young family members to new joinees, to understand the history of the business house that makes FMCG products. Emami’s brief to the Eka was simple—they didn’t want a museum but a tech-driven and interactive rendition of their story. The Eka team embarked on a large-scale oral history project, which was translated into dynamic walls, soundscapes and videoscapes. The centre is organised into seven experiential zones, featuring a 3D fibreglass installation created with the packaging of Emami over the years, an artistic rendition of the enormous paper manufacturing machines at the paper mills, and more.

The Godrej Archives was also started to mark a milestone. A committee was formed in 1995 by then-chairman, Sohrab Godrej, to mark the company’s centenary year celebrations in 1997. An ad was placed in the papers as an open call to the public to share any material related to Godrej. A lot of people responded—employees and customers—and they received, among other things, an old safe and a receipt signed by the group’s founder Ardeshir Godrej (1868-1936) in 1914. “We even found a quote where Gandhiji says, ‘Shri Godrej, it appears, has decided to run his whole business of making safes in the interest of the country.’,” says Vrunda Pathare, who heads the archives. Ardeshir Godrej was a supporter of Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement, and in 1897, began with manufacturing of locks.

Once the centenary celebration was done, they decided to hire a professional archivist to organise historical data in one place. Thus, the Godrej Archives were formally instituted in 2006. In 2015, the digitisation of the archives began to make things more accessible for both the team and visiting researchers.

Pathare points out another first in the Godrej Archives: In 1943, Ardeshir’s brother, Pirojsha, decided to expand the factory beyond the congested Lalbaug area of Mumbai to a new establishment in Vikhroli. It is at this facility that the ballot boxes were manufactured for the first-ever elections of independent India. It took less than four months to complete the order of more than 1.2 million steel boxes, which were transported via rail wagons. The team also collected engineering and industry magazines from the 1950s-60s with articles and editorials that reflect the intertwined aspirations of the company and the nation.

Going beyond artist biographies

Earlier this year, modernist artist Satish Gujral’s home in Delhi was opened to the public as Gujral House, a museum and archival space, each room revealing layers of his personality through sketches, photographs, and records of inspiration and process. Among the most interesting items is a beautiful letter to him from Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, under whom Gujral had studied while in Mexico.

“Only when we open up the personal archives of artists do we go beyond their artworks and into the milieus in which these artists were situated,” says Sneha Ragavan, senior researcher and head, Asia Art Archive of India, Delhi. “Piecing together these layered journeys is much more important than just artist biographies.”

Opened in Gujral’s centenary year, the house itself is an archive of post-Independence architecture, conceived in dialogue with architect Raj Rewal in the late 1960s. According to the artist’s son, Mohit Gujral, the house belongs to a moment when Indian architects and artists were collectively exploring what a modern cultural language for an independent India might look like. “The house reflects that moment of experimentation, where architecture, art and cultural life were closely intertwined,” he says.

The process for Gujral House began several years ago with drawings, blueprints, models and project documentation being organised and catalogued from the artist’s long and varied career. The material includes floor plans from the 1970s, and old photographs painstakingly collected from family archives.

“It will be interesting for scholars and critics to look at how Satish Gujral’s work reflected the history of the times,” says Feroze Gujral, founding trustee, The Gujral Foundation. “This is crucial given that his brother, Inder Kumar Gujral, was India’s prime minister. There was a strong political tone to their lives,” elaborates Feroze. The archival material brings together the personal and the public, along with the internal anxieties and challenges of the artist. “We are looking at Nehruvian-era modernism reflected in this art, and the artist-architect’s role in the building of an independent nation,” she adds.

Building the archive has been an ongoing process, particularly since artists of that era often worked across mediums and across the country. While reviewing the photos, the team found a rare image from the 1963-World Exhibition in New York commissioned by Indian Council for Cultural Relations. “There was also a huge mural that he’d created at The Oberoi New Delhi that had since been removed, and we had almost forgotten about it,” says Feroze, “We rediscovered it through a tiny clip in Silsila, where Amitabh Bachchan’s character walks past that mural.”

Putting together the archive has been a labour-intensive process, backed by research and technical conservation. Gujral also did murals for several public buildings in the 1950s and 1960s, some of which have since been removed, or are likely to be (like the large-scale mural at Shastri Bhawan in Delhi, which is to be demolished as part of the Central Vista Redevelopment Project). “These works face the same vulnerabilities as the architecture they are embedded in. One of the responsibilities of the archive is therefore to document these projects through drawings, photographs and architectural records,” says Mohit.

Some galleries and foundations are restoring archives and finding curatorial strands within them. Delhi-based photography gallery and design studio PHOTOINK, founded in 2001, holds the archives of architectural photographer Madan Mahatta and industrial photographer Ahmed Ali, both of whom were most active from the 1950s-80s. PHOTOINK’s founder and gallerist Devika Daulat Singh says these archives show us the dynamics of a society in formation. “What architectures did we aspire to build?” she says. “Madan Mahatta offers glimpses. What industries did we prioritise? Ahmed Ali will give you an unparalleled view. Kanu Gandhi traces the life and times of the Mahatma—his archive frames a complex portrait of the man behind the symbol.” Umrao Singh Sher-Gil (1870-1954), an aristocrat-photographer-scholar, in contrast, performs for the camera. Through his portraits, you also see the developments of early Indian photography.

Some archives have taken the form of museums, open to the public, like the House of Amrapali, whose jewellery museum found a home in Jaipur in 2018. Or the Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum in Ahmedabad, which opened in 2017 to showcase the paintings from across traditions, portraits, art in stone, metal and Bidri works, painted postcards from the collection of the noted industrialist, who set up some of the premier education and research institutions in the city along with scientist Vikram Sarabhai.

Sarmaya Arts Foundation, started by collector and art patron Paul Abraham, features an archive of his vast collection of folk arts, contemporary art, maps, coins, ceramics, textiles and manuscripts. It started as a digital repository in 2015, and took on a more public and physical form last year when the archive opened in the Lawrence & Mayo building in Fort in Mumbai with a research and exhibition space supported by an extensive library.

For fashion houses like Tarun Tahiliani and Ritu Kumar, the archives hold stories of craftsmanship, business acumen, and the evolution of design, luxury and couture in India. This becomes a springboard for future ideas, allowing them to innovate with or build on ideas they had once pioneered. “Tomorrow, whoever takes over my position to write the next chapter, they will have a reference point,” Tahiliani had told Lounge a few months ago during a walkthrough of his 900 sq. ft archives in Delhi that contain his work of the last 30 years. “I’m building my legacy. I’m systematising my memory.”

Archives also inculcate a sense of pride among employees, partners and collaborators. When the Amrapali Museum opened, some of the karigars (artisans) came to visit with their families. “They told us that until then it had been very difficult to explain to their families what their work entailed,” says Sasidharan, who had worked on the museum. “But the museum helped them understand what their family members had helped create.”

Building an archive of ideas

In early 2017, Dr Manmohan Singh, former prime minister of India, donated his personal archives, all digitised, to Ashoka University. “Initially, people were wary of giving their papers to a private university,” says Deepa Bhatnagar, director of Ashoka University’s Archives of Contemporary India. “Slowly others too decided to offer their collections.” Subsequently, the biggest challenge that emerged was space for storage. What began in a small room in 2017 spread across three buildings, making cataloguing difficult. It moved to a building dedicated to archival material in 2022. The team was expanded to include trained archivists and today includes 15-16 members. A reading room was set up for researchers, historians and students and a website in 2022.

Today, papers arrive at the archive in cartons, which are then put in the fumigation chamber for 4-5 days before being aired on tables. The contents are transferred to acid-free archival boxes after a thorough sorting process. They are labelled and digitised, with the originals put away in a climate-controlled room, with a temperature of 16-18°C and humidity between 35-50 per cent. Each collection takes anywhere between 6 months to a year to go through the entire process. Bhatnagar continues to do lectures and outreach programmes to encourage more people or their families to donate collections to ACI.

She points to the collection of actor Sajjan, best known for his role of Betaal in the 1980s serial Vikram Aur Betaal as one of the more fascinating collections. There are photos of the actor with Raj Kapoor, Nutan, Shyama, and others. “The archives don’t just tell the story of an individual artist but also of the development of theatre, television and film industry in the country,” says Bhatnagar. “There is more to him than the role of Betaal. We have handwritten manuscripts of his original plays, besides correspondence, press clippings and articles (dating from 1951 to 1971),” she says.

The Partition Archives from the collection of feminist writer-publisher Ritu Menon contain recordings of interviews of women affected by borders and boundaries. Her papers provide new insights into gender identity, caste and class and the sociopolitics of violence. Nainital Samachar’s founding editor Rajiv Lochan Shah has also donated his papers from 1977-2023. This is a significant repository as the late 1970s marked a period of intense forest-related activism in Uttarakhand, and is the beginning of the environmental movement in India.

Today, ACI gets visits from teams from the National Archives of India interested in understanding archiving processes. “We also have workshops encouraging students to learn about the use of primary source material, and tools for preservation and archiving of original documents,” she adds.

In Bengaluru,the Archives at NCBS houses over 400,000 processed objects in 100+ collections. These include paper-based manuscripts, negatives, photographs, books, fine art, audio recordings, scientific equipment, letters, and field and lab notes. The 2000-square-feet centre at NCBS includes space for research, processing, exhibitions, recording, and a storage facility with monitors for temperature, light, humidity, air quality, water, fire, pests, and noise. The impulses for the archive were many—ranging from research and exhibitions looking back at the spice trade route and medicinal plants to oral history interviews of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research scientists conducted in the early 2000s. A push for an institutional archive happened in 2016 with the NCBS turning 25. Following requests from donors, the space opened to the public in 2019 as an open collecting centre for the history of biology in contemporary India. It further expanded scope in the subsequent years, and by 2022, it formally became a public collecting centre for the history of science in contemporary India.

The conservation lab is led by Sindhu N, who formalised the first archival assessment template for manuscript collections in India. She has also worked on the archives of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. “As conservators, we assess every material that comes in and add notes for the archivist,” she says. “We revisit the documents for a condition report after the folders have been stored in a controlled environment. Each note accompanies a rating between 1 to 5. 1 is for material that is most deteriorated and requires immediate intervention, 2 if it is okay for the next 10 years, so on and so forth.” Last March, the team finished the condition report for all the material received till 2024.

In its collection are the papers of Anil Sadgopal, a biochemist who co-founded the voluntary organisation Kishore Bharati in 1970, to apply science and technology to rural development. He designed a system of science education for children in middle schools in Madhya Pradesh, which came to be known as the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme. They also have the papers of ornithologist Ravi Sankaran, the molecular biologist and NCBS founding director Obaid Siddiqi, and agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan. In fact, the space in which the archive is housed was once Siddiqi’s laboratory. Researchers can understand early developments in the space programme through the papers of TSG Sastry, a physicist who worked on the Thumba rocket programme. It is not just scientists but also artists and art students who approach the Archives at NCBS to observe handwritten and hand-drawn material. The collection of Jamal Ara (1923-1995), a noted ornithologist known for her extensive field and scientific observations of birds in Jharkhand.

At the Delhi-based Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, Allana wants to encourage families and individuals to take control of their collections. It currently has over 150,000 images on art and theatre. A recent addition is the photographs and papers of Pandurang Khankhoje, one of the founders of the Ghadar Party in Bombay. The party was founded in the early 20th century by expatriate Indians in opposition to British rule in India. Allana was approached by his family with images of the Khankhoje, who worked as a botanist and scientist who , and had travelled to Persepolis, Aleppo, Syria, Turkey during World War I. Over 200 rare images are part of the archive. “We also get to know that Mexican muralist Diego Rivera dedicated a mural to Khankhoje [who had moved to Mexico in the 1920s]. Archives create these connections when people share material,” he says. The foundation’s work is about linking intersectional ideas from across different collections and archives through exhibitions as well. For instance, a show, Distortion (January-February 2026), engaged with personal and found archives through the works of two artists, Sukanya Ghosh and Nandan Ghiya. The former has looked at her family repository while Ghiya has turned to vintage images to offer a contemporary voice in their respective forms of art.

Inspiring the next generation of archivists

Raghavan of Asia Art Archive of India says it is important for aspiring archivists to understand that physical and digital archives have very different organising structures. In the former, you typically organise by material type—photos go together while paper-based materials are stored separately.

The logic of the online archive is quite different, opening up the possibilities of rearranging material not just by medium or type but also through schematic categories. “Many people think archiving equals digitisation, but actually it's just one of the many aspects—including image cropping, file conversions, annotation, re-organisation, all the while keeping a tab on technological advancements,” says Ragavan. The AAA in India started 15 years ago to showcase the interdisciplinary conversations taking place between artistic practices. “The rest is about obtaining any additional information that could add value to an artist's existing archives.”

The AAA team acts as intermediaries or facilitators to ensure that things actually reach the appropriate institution. For instance, one of Ragavan’s acquaintances reached out with the archive of Benoy Sarkar, one of India’s leading graphic designers from the 1960s, who designed many iconic logos including Indian Airlines, Delhi Transport Corporation, and Airports Authority of India. The team helped with identification of material. “We also try to ensure archives find the right homes. A few years ago, we came across an important design archive at the home of a designer-educator. We got in touch with people at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad,” explains Ragavan. Soon after, this collection became a part of the NID archives. “We need more archives in the region. The challenge is that archiving is resource-intensive. We also need more courses related to the subject, and that’s why we recently had a workshop on various aspects of archival practice,” she adds. Creating and maintaining archives is a resource-intensive process, requiring funding, keeping up to date with technological advancements and being open to innovation. In such a scenario, grants by not-for-profit institutions and foundations goes a long way in fostering an archiving culture.

To bring archival material alive for everyone, institutions and collectors hold workshops and exhibitions. “We don’t just preserve archives; we connect the dots by creating exhibitions around them,” says Ragavan. At her Delhi office, right now, Delhi by Design is on show, which draws from the digital archive the magazine, Design, published between 1957 and 1988. The show focuses on various aspects of architecture, urban planning, and the city’s extension into the national capital region. By examining the cultural spaces that emerged in the 1950s such as Lalit Kala Akademi, Triveni Kala Sangam, and the National Gallery for Modern Art, the team poses questions about the cultural infrastructure for the arts. “We are currently looking at a larger project called ‘Modernism in the Magazines’ around periodicals or journals that staged important debates and discussions on art. This is evident from our earlier digitisation of Vrishchik, a magazine founded by Gulammohammed Sheikh in 1969,” she says.

At Sarmaya, the 12-person strong archiving team works with two external supporting agencies on storytelling. As a collector, Abraham might have bought a painting or an object, which was aesthetically pleasing to him. But the object would also contain a story about the artist’s motivations or the circumstances in which the work was created. The narrative around this is customised for different mediums—a short story accompanying a visual for social media, an insightful interview for YouTube, a film or an exhibition around a theme. Abraham cites the example of the last exhibition at the Sarmaya space, titled Odyssey of the Rupee, which looks back at 500 years of history of the metal currency in the subcontinent. “Many people assumed they knew everything about the rupee. Not many are aware that Sher Shah Suri launched a two-metal currency with a stable exchange ratio in 1538. This system was continued by the Mughals, and from it was born the ‘rupiya’.The currency became acceptable not only within the empire but also in countries that they traded with in Arabia, East Africa and the East Indies. The rupee is the national denomination of many countries in this region even today,” he elaborates.

At Godrej Archives, besides an annual lecture series on business history, scholar-in-residence programmes and regular exhibitions, efforts are on to connect specific objects from the archive with latest technological advancements. “Godrej received the first patent for its springless lock in 1908. We didn’t have a specimen of this lock in our collection. So, we approached the engineers at the in-house 3D printing lab to create a specimen based on the drawings and specifications in the archive,” explains Pathare. The patent, however, didn’t reveal all the details. So the team of engineers took two months to conduct further research. “They ended up making a prototype, and it was a fantastic exercise of recreating a historical piece using contemporary technology,” she adds.

What makes the creation of archives an urgent exercise at this present moment? According to Allana, we are living in difficult times, where cultural centres are being destroyed.“People lose their lives trying to protect works of art and archival material. How do you connect to history if you don’t have access to artefacts and material from a particular time? Archives can bring to fore hitherto invisibilised histories and movements.”

In such a scenario, archives of all shapes, hues and forms, perhaps, play the most important role of all—that of a witness.