Deciphering Archives: Researching and Reading The Anglo-Indian Archives

“Anglo-Indian” is not an exclusive identity, and the people belonging to the community may not necessarily identify with the term. As a result, there is often divergence between what an archive of such a community states and what the family or individual represented in it may actually think about belonging to such a grouping. It is in situations like these that associations and implications of the past become factors to unravel: How does one historicise a moment from a family album in an anthropological sense, given that it is so personal? How do the preciousness of time and the location of the gaze enter the archive in order to address history? How does one attribute identities to those who may conform to a definition delineated within the archive, but do not necessarily want to identify with it?

In this continuing conversation with artist and designer Adira Thekkuveettil, some of these questions and issues are brought to the fore. A co-founder of The Anglo-Indian Archives, Thekkuveettil discusses the need to centre personal narratives while presenting alternative ways of reading archives. She foregrounds thematic connections between the documentation by families, which allow the singular narratives of individual family archives to expand further, thereby opening doors for research to reinterpret these images and information in the future. In all of these questions and approaches, Thekkuveettil emphasises how the three-member team—comprising of photographers Dileep Prakash, Sheik Mohamed Ishaq and herself—are mindful about the extent to which the families’ lives to seep into the archive, keeping in mind that it is a telling and documenting of someone else’s history.

^{(Featured Image: Dennis Pereira, Shirley Slynn, Linette Pereira and Alfred Das in Chatribari. [Guwahati, 1978. Image Courtesy of Linette Pereira and The Anglo-Indian Archives.])}

In case you missed the first part of this conversation, you can watch it here.

To read more about the representation of the Anglo-Indian community, please click here and here.