Introducing the MIDA Archival Reflexicon: Objectives and New Avenues

Table of Con­tents
Objec­tives of the MIDA Archival Guide: New Avenues and Old­er Frame­works  |  An excur­sion into the Ger­man archival land­scapes on mod­ern Indi­an his­to­ry  |  Archival Guide as a site for crit­i­cal engage­ment with sources |  End­notes

Ger­man archives offer a rich spec­trum of sources relat­ed to mod­ern Indi­an his­to­ry and a pos­si­bil­i­ty for devel­op­ing new research direc­tions in the domain of transna­tion­al his­to­ries and his­tor­i­cal com­par­i­son through an explo­ration of the his­to­ry of Indo-Ger­man entan­gle­ments. These sources can also offer schol­ars the pos­si­bil­i­ty of acquir­ing new research per­spec­tives, indeed a new lens, for engag­ing with mod­ern Indi­an his­to­ry by not sole­ly pri­or­i­tiz­ing British colo­nial archives. The MIDA-Archival Guide, which accom­pa­nies the project’s online data­base, is an open-access forum for reflex­ive dis­cus­sions on the rich India-relat­ed hold­ings of Ger­man archives. One of the main objec­tives of the Archival Guide is to reflect on how the turn towards entan­gled transna­tion­al and glob­al his­to­ries not only rais­es new the­o­ret­i­cal ques­tions, but also con­fronts us with method­olog­i­cal issues on the rela­tion­ship between entan­gled his­to­ries and archives. At the same time, it is a site for acquir­ing com­pre­hen­sive overviews of India-relat­ed archival hold­ings of Ger­man archives for spe­cif­ic themes.

Since Sep­tem­ber 2018, the DFG fund­ed long-term project “Mod­ern India in Ger­man Archives, 1706–1989” (“Das Mod­erne Indi­en in deutschen Archiv­en”, MIDA) has suc­cess­ful­ly launched an open-access data­base (with an exten­sive cat­a­logue and index) that enlists, index­es and describes hold­ings relat­ed to mod­ern Indi­an his­to­ry and the his­to­ry of Indo-Ger­man entan­gle­ments, which are housed in Ger­man archives. The time peri­od in focus is from the estab­lish­ment of the Dan­ish-Halle Mis­sion in South India (1706) up to the end of the polit­i­cal divi­sion of Ger­many (1989/90). The data­base is a plat­form made avail­able on a long-term basis to the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty of his­to­ri­ans of South Asia as a “grow­ing” and open dig­i­tal resource.

The Archival Guide gives users a the­mat­ic and prob­lema­tized overview into the hold­ings. The objec­tive is to open a space of dis­cus­sion on the hold­ings that does not lim­it the his­to­ry of Indo-Ger­man entan­gle­ments to a bina­ry log­ic and to crit­i­cal­ly reflect on the order­ing archi­tec­ture of the archives.

Objectives of the MIDA Archival Guide: New Avenues and Older Frameworks

Con­ven­tion­al archival guides are often a handy tool kit that enables users to con­duct fruit­ful search­es relat­ed to archives, their cat­a­logues and data­bas­es, their order­ing prin­ci­ples and any oth­er find­ing aids that may be use­ful for his­tor­i­cal research. Some guides have attempt­ed to famil­iar­ize stu­dents with archival vocab­u­lary and his­tor­i­cal meth­ods (for exam­ple the Berlin­er Archiv Guide[1] or the archival guide of the Soci­ety of Amer­i­can Archivists titled Using Archives: A Guide to Effec­tive Research)[2] in order to reduce the sense of awe and intim­i­da­tion induced by the insti­tu­tion. There are oth­ers, how­ev­er, which are more spe­cif­ic and offer details of rel­e­vant ref­er­ence books, reports of vis­i­tors, back­ground infor­ma­tion, notes, dis­cus­sions and cor­re­spon­dences on what one should know before enter­ing the phys­i­cal brick and mor­tar space called the archive (for exam­ple the instruc­tive Guides to Russ­ian Archives made avail­able by the Uni­ver­si­ty of War­wick).[3] Cer­tain archives also offer high­ly sys­tem­atized archival guides which pro­vide users infor­ma­tion on the hold­ings and their struc­ture, inter­ac­tive links to cat­a­logues and guides, research themes with bib­li­ogra­phies and a selec­tion of pri­ma­ry sources as well as use­ful data­bas­es and online sources (for exam­ple the elab­o­rate League of Nations Archive Resource Guide).[4]  While some online por­tals sim­ply offer a list of sev­er­al archives with basic infor­ma­tion and some­times a brief descrip­tion of the hold­ings (see Ham­burg Wis­sen Dig­i­tal)[5], some archives offer pos­si­bil­i­ties to see an exten­sive list of archival guides which are the­mat­i­cal­ly orga­nized and direct read­ers to enlist­ed hold­ings (as in the case of The Nation­al Archives, the Unit­ed King­dom, Scot­land and Wales).[6] At the same time, cer­tain forums have attempt­ed to give com­pre­hen­sive overviews on archival order­ing and the Ger­man archival land­scape (see Clio Online).[7] In short, the land­scape of archival guides is an eclec­tic one where the kind of infor­ma­tion that users can access varies from the gen­er­al to the par­tic­u­lar. It may be summed up more gen­er­al­ly that archival guides are a prag­mat­ic know-how appa­ra­tus, which offers a wide spec­trum of infor­ma­tion rang­ing from read­ing room hours to the rules of the archive and from cat­a­logues to instruc­tive indexes.

The MIDA Archival Guide, while being sim­i­lar to the avail­able pletho­ra of archival guides, dif­fers in two con­crete ways –

1. An excursion into the German archival landscapes on modern Indian history

First­ly, it is a plat­form for pro­vid­ing users an exten­sive overview on India relat­ed hold­ings in Ger­man archives on very spe­cif­ic research top­ics (for exam­ple if research­ing on the Mysore wars, users can have a detailed insight into the land­scape of hold­ings that offer sources on the wars from the per­spec­tive of the Han­nover­ian reg­i­ment that par­tic­i­pat­ed in the wars from Ger­many).[8] The objec­tive here is to offer users an exhaus­tive sketch of the archival land­scape in Ger­many on a top­ic. Where should one look when work­ing on a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject of inter­est? Which hold­ings are rel­e­vant and what can they offer? How can these hold­ings offer new per­spec­tives for writ­ing ‘oth­er’ and ‘new­er’ his­to­ries, which have been exten­sive­ly writ­ten about by rely­ing on oth­er sources (for exam­ple British colo­nial sources in the case of the Mysore Wars)? The MIDA Archival Guide will offer a series of posts which will engage with these issues. In doing so, the posts open avenues for new­er research by refer­ring to new­ly dis­cov­ered sources. They there­in aim to evoke the inter­est of users into less­er-explored research areas through the lens of sources in Ger­man hold­ings. At the same time, while open­ing new sites of research, the posts pro­vide read­ers with an over­ar­ch­ing syn­op­sis on the ‘where’, ‘how-to’ and pos­si­ble ‘what’ of the theme– a help­ful out­line for how to com­mence when con­duct­ing research on a par­tic­u­lar topic.

Where­as some posts intend to re-open themes which have pre­vi­ous­ly been exten­sive­ly researched (albeit main­ly with­in colo­nial archives) through the prism of hold­ings housed in Ger­man archives (as men­tioned, the Mysore wars is an illus­tra­tive exam­ple of the same), oth­ers aim at evok­ing inter­est in top­ics which have been gen­er­al­ly less explored. These hith­er­to rel­a­tive­ly under­ex­plored themes can be instruc­tive in two ways–

(i) They can open new research avenues in the his­to­ry of Indo-Ger­man entan­gle­ments (for exam­ple, see the post on the GDR diplo­mat Her­bert Fis­ch­er in India or the posts on forestry and botany as a site of Indo-Ger­man entan­gle­ments) and;

(ii) They can draw our atten­tion to small­er archives and pri­vate col­lec­tions housed in Ger­man archives, which may offer new insights into these entan­gled his­to­ries as well as their accom­pa­ny­ing entan­gled archives (for exam­ple, see the post on the Horst Krüger col­lec­tion housed in the archive of the Leib­niz-Zen­trum Mod­ern­er Ori­ent, Berlin or the post on the Petra and Joachim Hei­drich col­lec­tions in the same archive).

2. Archival Guide as a site for critical engagement with sources

Anoth­er objec­tive of the Archival Guide is to reflect on larg­er the­o­ret­i­cal and method­olog­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions which arise when engag­ing in the seem­ing­ly banal job of cat­a­logu­ing, describ­ing, order­ing and index­ing. Where­as the guide does aim to show users what is to be found in the rich hold­ings of Ger­man archives when research­ing on themes in mod­ern Indi­an his­to­ry, we also intend to do so trans­par­ent­ly by shar­ing the how of our own process of cat­a­logu­ing and col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion on such sources.

The Dig­i­tal Turn has enabled the extrac­tion of infor­ma­tion from archives and their re-order­ing in new­er dig­i­tal archi­tec­tures. Easy access to this new­ly ordered infor­ma­tion can be high­ly ben­e­fi­cial in that it can enable access to a world of new­ly dis­cov­ered and unex­plored sources, some­times even with­out the researcher hav­ing to phys­i­cal­ly vis­it an archive. It can, how­ev­er, also de-con­tex­tu­alise infor­ma­tion and iso­late it from where it is phys­i­cal­ly housed. Full-text search­es often lead to very exact infor­ma­tion that usu­al­ly belongs to a larg­er archival envi­ron­ment. The relat­ed­ness of any two hold­ings that have sources on mod­ern Indi­an his­to­ry may some­times not be vis­i­ble in these full-text search­es. Such con­tex­tu­al infor­ma­tion, which can often be cru­cial for his­to­ri­ans, espe­cial­ly when writ­ing transna­tion­al his­to­ries of entan­gle­ments, can be lost in the pre­cise speci­fici­ty of search results. The MIDA Archival Guide is thus dif­fer­ent from con­ven­tion­al archival guides in that it brings such issues to the fore­front of dis­cus­sion through its essays.

Giv­en that the data­base offers users the pos­si­bil­i­ty to do full-text search­es and that it also incor­po­rates a vast cor­pus of key­word index­es (made for each archive enlist­ed in the data­base), the Guide does not intend to repeat these exten­sive lists of key­words in the form of an open access the­saurus made avail­able in the guide. A the­mat­ic orga­ni­za­tion of the posts, how­ev­er, enables users to get overviews of hold­ings on par­tic­u­lar themes. A larg­er over­ar­ch­ing aim is crit­i­cal­ly reflect on the results that are to be seen in the data­base. These dis­cus­sions become all the more nec­es­sary in order to avoid the trap of re-enforc­ing the writ­ing of his­to­ries, which may con­form to the insti­tu­tion­al and ter­ri­to­ri­al­is­ing log­ic of exist­ing archives. The Guide will address these aspects in two ways out­lined below.

(i) Method­olog­i­cal­ly this entails a dis­cus­sion on how the data­base ‘dig­i­tal­ly’ trans­forms the archi­tec­ture of archival hold­ings list­ed in it. The Glos­sary of Archival and Records Ter­mi­nol­o­gy, pub­lished by the Soci­ety of Amer­i­can Archivists dis­tin­guish­es between two order­ing prin­ci­ples: prove­nance (Provinienz-Prinzip) and per­ti­nence (Per­ti­nenz-Prinzip). The prin­ci­ple of prove­nance is defined as “1. The ori­gin or source of some­thing. – 2. Infor­ma­tion regard­ing the ori­gins, cus­tody, and own­er­ship of an item or col­lec­tion”[9]. Alter­na­tive­ly, “[p]rovenance is a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple of archives, refer­ring to the indi­vid­ual, fam­i­ly, or orga­ni­za­tion that cre­at­ed or received the items in a col­lec­tion. The prin­ci­ple of prove­nance or the respect des fonds dic­tates that records of dif­fer­ent ori­gins (prove­nance) be kept sep­a­rate to pre­serve their con­text”[10]. In con­trast to this, the oth­er order­ing prin­ci­ple in archival ter­mi­nol­o­gy is the prin­ci­ple of per­ti­nence. This is defined as: “A prin­ci­ple of arrang­ing records based on con­tent, with­out regard for their prove­nance or orig­i­nal order”.[11]  Hold­ings relat­ed to India are housed in Ger­man archives in accor­dance with the prin­ci­ple of prove­nance. The MIDA data­base trans­forms these cat­e­go­riza­tions accord­ing to the prin­ci­ple of per­ti­nence by extract­ing such sources and order­ing them the­mat­i­cal­ly, with India as the focus.[12]

One of the objec­tives of the process of pro­duc­ing the data­base has been to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly mir­ror the archi­tec­ture of the archive con­cerned and nonethe­less show­case the India-spe­cif­ic sources in a new sys­tem­atized order. How can this be done effec­tive­ly so that the data­base allows users to view the sources as they exist in the con­text in which they are embed­ded in the archival struc­ture while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly insert­ing them in a new sys­tem­at­ic? The Archival Guide opens a dis­cus­sion on these ques­tions to under­line the method­olog­i­cal impli­ca­tions of cat­a­logu­ing India-relat­ed hold­ings in a new database.

(ii) The­mat­i­cal­ly, the Archival Guide is an ever-expand­ing site for dis­cus­sions on new research top­ics. Where­as numer­ous posts high­light and reflect upon the results already read­i­ly view­able in the data­base (for exam­ple the post on Her­bert Fis­ch­er, many of whose sources are housed in the hold­ings of the Bun­de­sarchiv list­ed in the data­base), new­er the­mat­ic avenues open par­al­lel to the devel­op­ment of the project. Some of the themes, which might not be ade­quate­ly rep­re­sent­ed in the hold­ings list­ed in the data­base, can nev­er­the­less be cov­ered by posts writ­ten for the Archival Guide by experts on such spe­cif­ic research top­ics. This is a strat­e­gy neces­si­tat­ed by the aware­ness that, owing to lim­it­ed man­pow­er, not all India relat­ed hold­ings in all Ger­man archives can be enlist­ed in a peri­od of twelve years with­in the data­base. The Archival Guide will thus be an open plat­form which will invite exter­nal schol­ars for con­tri­bu­tions on their area of exper­tise. This will there­in make it pos­si­ble to have posts which give overviews of Ger­man archival hold­ings on themes not cov­ered by the data­base and, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, mark the begin­ning of exchange with a larg­er com­mu­ni­ty of his­to­ri­ans of South Asia.

(iii) The­o­ret­i­cal­ly our con­cerns relate to how a project like MIDA can cre­ate a new struc­ture of meta­da­ta that cuts across the insti­tu­tion­al and ter­ri­to­r­i­al log­ic of exist­ing archives and, at the same time, avoids, replac­ing this log­ic with an equal­ly nar­row and ter­ri­to­ry-bound bilat­er­al ‘Indo-Ger­man’ log­ic? Which for­mats of find­ing aids are required for cre­at­ing transna­tion­al research facil­i­ties in the con­text of such a project so as to over­come the false sep­a­ra­tion of the ‘tech­ni­cal’ and the ‘sci­en­tif­ic’? The Archival Guide aims to address these ques­tions through a range of crit­i­cal­ly engag­ing posts. Besides, the­o­ret­i­cal dis­cus­sions on entan­gled archives and entan­gled his­to­ries, Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties or entan­gled insti­tu­tion­al and oral archives will engage with debates with­in exist­ing lit­er­a­ture and the pos­si­bil­i­ty for new the­o­ret­i­cal direc­tions in mod­ern Indi­an his­to­ry and the his­to­ry of Indo-Ger­man entanglements.

The MIDA Archival Guide is thus a Reflex­i­con- a reflex­ive lex­i­con- of how to nav­i­gate through India relat­ed hold­ings in Ger­man archives, acquire an overview of the same for spe­cif­ic top­ics, and of how to crit­i­cal­ly engage with larg­er the­o­ret­i­cal and method­olog­i­cal debates that emerge from the exer­cise of trac­ing, extract­ing, list­ing, order­ing and index­ing information.

We hope you enjoy the nav­i­ga­tion­al experience!

Endnotes

[1]	Berlin­er Archiv Guide, Hum­boldt-Uni­ver­sität zu Berlin in co-oper­a­tion with Facts and Files, Berlin, https://www.iaaw.hu-berlin.de/de/region/suedasien/publikationen/archiv/berlinerarchivguide_hub_2010.pdf, last accessed Novem­ber 26, 2017.
[2]	L. Schmidt, Using Archives: A Guide to Effec­tive Research, Soci­ety of Amer­i­can Archivists, 2011, pp. 1–16, http://files.archivists.org/pubs/UsingArchives/Using-Archives-Guide.pdf, accessed Sep­tem­ber 4, 2018.
[3]	M.J. Berry and M.J. Ilic, Using the Russ­ian Archives: an Infor­mal Prac­ti­cal guide for Begin­ners Based on Users’ Expe­ri­ence, British Aca­d­e­m­ic Com­mit­tee for Col­lab­o­ra­tion With Russ­ian Archives, in asso­ci­a­tion with the Cen­tre for Russ­ian and East Euro­pean Stud­ies, Uni­ver­si­ty of Birm­ing­ham. First pub­lished July 1999. Revised for elec­tron­ic pub­li­ca­tion Decem­ber 2002, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/guides/, accessed Sep­tem­ber 5, 2018.
[4]	The League of Nations Archives Resource Guide, http://libraryresources.unog.ch/c.php?g=462663, accessed Sep­tem­ber 7, 2018.
[5]	Ham­burg, Wis­sen Dig­i­tal, http://www.hamburgwissen-digital.de/weitere-angebote/archivfuehrer.html, accessed Sep­tem­ber 7, 2018.
[6]	The Nation­al Archives, UK, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/, accessed Sep­tem­ber 7, 2018.
[7]	F. M. Bischoff, Archive, 2016, https://guides.clio-online.de/guides/sammlungen/archive/2016, accessed Sep­tem­ber 8, 2018.
[8]	See post by M. C. Füch­sle, „Quellen zu den Mysore-Kriegen (1766–1799) aus deutschen Archiv­en“, MIDA Archivführer.
[9]	The Glos­sary of Archival and Records Ter­mi­nol­o­gy, Chica­go: The Soci­ety of Amer­i­can Archivists, 2005, p. 317.
[10]	The Glos­sary of Archival and Records Ter­mi­nol­o­gy, Chica­go: The Soci­ety of Amer­i­can Archivists, 2005, p. 317.
[11]	The Glos­sary of Archival and Records Ter­mi­nol­o­gy, Chica­go: The Soci­ety of Amer­i­can Archivists, 2005, p. 292.
[12]	For more reflec­tions on the process of re-struc­tur­ing through data­bas­es, also see, Baj­pai, A., Hey­mann, J. and Sus­ki, T., “Trac­ing India in Ger­man Archives: Entan­gled Pasts in the age of Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties”, in: South Asia Chron­i­cle, 6, pp. 289–314.

Anan­di­ta Baj­pai, IAAW, Hum­boldt-Uni­ver­sität zu Berlin, Leib­niz-Zen­trum Mod­ern­er Orient