‘What are you looking for?’: archiving Pondicherry’s industrial past 1954-2020

Abstract

What happens when your archive does not pre-exist your research? When there is no index and no established norms of access and use? In my research on industrial decline and working class life in Pondicherry’s textile mills, I have routinely encountered this situation. The archives of the mills lie outside formal archival systems, fragmented across offices, homes and the crumbling structures of the mills themselves. There they are consumed by termites and mold, sometimes damaged beyond recovery by natural calamities and everyday neglect, resting cheek by jowl with other rusty remnants of an industrial past. They stubbornly resist forms of archivization that the conventions of historical research rest upon, calling for a reimagination of the archive and our disciplinary norms of engaging with it. Rather than seeing this as another manifestation of institutional neglect and dysfunction in the global south, I argue in this paper that the story of this ‘archive’  – its fragmentation, its silences and its incoherences – is part of the story of Pondicherry’s deindustrialization. The city’s growing disconnect with its industrial past is mirrored in the vagaries of its archive. I propose that the partial and fragmented materiality of this archive, often at odds with its evidentiary value, is a significant key to understanding the historical processes that have produced this paper trail.