From mid-2018 to mid-2019 I spent a year in the city of Kolkata setting up an archive of the city through its history of civic activism, or at the very least, to germinate the seeds of such an archive. More specifically, I worked closely with two individuals who had been actively involved in the creation of a city-wide housing rights movement in the 1980s. Through conversations with them and through the papers and documents they had collected and saved over the years, I was able to start understanding a larger ecology of activism in the city in the years following the tumult of the Emergency and the Naxalite movement. Taking activism as an archive of the city meant confronting overlapping histories of conflict, aspiration, hope, and suffering, encounters with the city’s pasts lost to us not only in the sense of a moment in time that has elapsed but through the far-reaching socio-economic changes that make and unmake a city. Often, far more than an illuminating record of this past, the archive only seemed to multiply this sense of irretrievable loss.

Archives have many uses. Some find their way into expertly made catalogues and special air-conditioned rooms that they only leave to be gazed upon by highly accomplished individuals with special permissions. Magisterial histories are written on the weight of these records. But many others have more modest uses. One of them is insect food. Insects that eat paper are colloquially called bookworms. That’s what we call people who read a lot too. Most bookworms are not in fact worms at all, they are insect larva that eat through the pages of a book or a sheaf of letters, following syntactical rules of their own making. With their teeth they connect words, names, and sounds we would never dare connect. Archives are terrified of them, and often caught up in hopeless battles against these interlopers chewing their way through the past with barbaric irreverence.

Perhaps this too is a way of knowing the past, and perhaps there exist among bookworms, individuals that satisfy both definitions of the term, master historians that have tasted, become nourished by, and excreted the best parts of history, never to be equaled by any human consigned to knowing the past only through our eyes and ears.

Measured in linear feet and cubic metres – length and volume – the archive is a constant reminder that the historical record is matter occupying space. And like a celestial body it attracts other matter into its orbit. Dust and debris settle around the archive like its extended family, rife with incongruities and inconsistencies.

The bookworm vexed the ancient Greeks, an unsettling reminder of the thingness of texts - a non-reader chewing its way through a book somewhere in a forgotten cupboard. To be consigned to the bookworms was to be out of sight and marginal to public discourse – a kind of silencing or forgetting.¹

Far away from the Greeks, sitting on the floor of a South Calcutta house I face a number of nondescript brown cardboard cartons arrayed in front of me. I carefully retrieve stacks of paper from the cartons and arrange them on the floor around me in some semblance of a system, stringing together letters, leaflets, reports, books, newspaper cuttings, magazines, notebooks and journals by the names and places they appear to have in common. Slippery and errant, they never want to stay in one place. Illicit whispers traverse the sacred boundaries I have drawn. Occasionally they erupt in full scale revolt, upending everything.

Many of these records originated in the offices of a non-governmental organization that worked with the residents of several unauthorized settlements in the city. Invisible on maps, these settlements hewed close to the topography of the city, spreading on unused public land along canals, next to railway lines, under large bridges and flyovers. Declared illegal by the state, the residents of these settlements, most of them migrants from neighbouring districts, lived under the constant threat of eviction.

In Baghbazaar, 85 families living undisturbed on unused Corporation land for upto 40 years, were evicted violently by Corporation officials after overnight verbal notice only, on 28 May 1984, from ½ Annada Niyogi Lane, in order to resettle just 20 Corporation sweepers. A further 6-7 housesholds of rickshaw- and thela-pullers were thrown onto the streets as a part of this resettlement, from land where they were earlier living with the Corporation sweepers, now taken over for the Baghbazaar Station. The Jagannath Ghat recalls the brutal eviction in 1983 of 1500 people from the same site, and the burning of their homes. And in Ahiritola and Sovabazaar, families who had established for themselves at least some minimum of dignity in their lives on unused piece of public land, have been forced by the construction of the 0-rail boundary wall into inhumanly small 2 ft spaces or onto the open footpaths. There has been no attempt to improve their situation or at least equal what they earlier had. -‘Press Release – Continued Unlawful Evictions For Circular Rail’. (SQR198410), V. Ramaswamy Papers, Kolkata Urban Archive

Within two paragraphs encompassing a few square kilometres of the city, a history of displacements. A pattern repeated across other parts of the city. An archive of housing rights is an archive of routine and brutal violence, where things sometimes manifest in the moment of their erasure. Settlements become visible in the historical record at the moment when the walls are flattened by a bulldozer or the roof burns to a crisp. To archive this history is to archive a series of denials, erasures and silences.

Ruby. Chingrighata. Beleghata. Hyatt Regency. The bus thunders effortlessly along this fabulous Bypass. Just north of the forested mound called Kadapahar. Some members of the community have lived there since the 60’s, many came and settled in the 70s’s. I try to catch the wiry conductor’s eye, I want to know the way to Kadapara. In April 1991 the community noticed that some people were surveying the adjacent piece of land, to the west and south-west of them, and carrying out soil tests. Say Salt Lake Stadium, say Hyatt Regency, say Kadapara. You’re on the same concrete shoulder testing a cigarette vendor’s memory. On 22 August 1991, the Economic Times carried a news report stating that the West Bengal Government had handed over land to Duncans Agro Industries Ltd (or the G P Goenka Group) for putting up a major hospital complex in association with Apollo Hospitals of Madras. I overhear a woman waiting for her son’s medical report call it “a perfect blend of technological excellence, complete infrastructure, competent care and heartfelt hospitality”. It seems a big question as to how a piece of land that was till recently a municipal dumping ground for the city’s waste (‘Kadapara’ – see Municipal records) and therefore unstable and full of toxic substance, could be allocated for a hospital. Between its gleaming walls and the climbing pillars of the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, in a wedge of asphalt autos spin in stop-start spurts of revs and skids. That the community’s petition had for a while been misplaced in his office, that there had been communication problems within his organization, and that construction had gone ahead without consultations with the Chinnamul Samiti. That according to the Predominant Land Use Map of the area prepared and issued by the CMDA in 1983 (Ward 31, Map 16), the site in question is shown as ‘OPEN (PARK, PLAYGROUND)’. East Calcutta sun bathing its halls in lively light, begone hospital gloom! Just a quick peek over the buttresses into a plantation of solar panels burning to save the world. Most work as manual labourers: construction workers; daily labourers; thela-pullers; rickshaw-pullers; cycle van-pullers; domestic servants; waste-pickers; ‘gool’ makers; gardeners; bamboo construction workers; masons; plumbers; cobblers; vegetable and fruit sellers; vehicle drivers; workers in small factories nearby; pig-keeping; running small shops. In a city that cannot bear to pull, pick, lift, make, run. Kadapahar-Kadapara; the mountain and its neighbourhood. ‘Vacant’ (even though occupied). The community has established its formal address as “89 Canal Circular Road, Kadapara, Calcutta 700 054”.²

Lives, and their vulnerabilities, surface in this archive in unexpected ways. They appear as petitioners and complainants, as officials, as writers of letters, reports, newspaper articles, as statistical figures and victims. Some speak in their own voice, they describe and argue and contemplate and coax. Others are quoted, enumerated, reported upon, attested to. In this maelstrom of identities, some more legible than others, names come appended to petitions and press releases and meeting minutes, expressed in the assured, practiced swirl of a signature. What does it mean to be present in the archive and what kind of presence is a name or a signature?

List of Tenants
Abstract: List of tenants with Hut No., Name, Name of Landlord and Rent
Language: English
Call Number: NTJXXXX01
1 page handwritten
Date Added: 6/6/2019, 11:16:20 AM
Modified: 6/17/2019, 2:46:50 PM

Report of the Community at Park Circus No. 4 Bridge after the collapse of a hoarding on the jhupris along the bridge on 16 May 1995
Author: Krishna Roy
Author: Indrani Dasgupta
Date: 28 June 1995
Language: English
Call Number: PC199516
8 page(s); typed
6 annexures
Annexure I: List of people admitted to the Chitta Ranjan National Medical College Hospital on 16 May 1995
Annexure II: Report of the fact finding following the collapse of the hoarding by Calcutta 36 organisation
Annexure III: List of people who received sari from Unnayan following the disaster on 16 May 1995
Annexure IV: Newsclippings related to the incident of the collapse of the hoarding on 16 May 1995 at the Park Circus No. 4 Bridge
Annexure V: Follow-up news of Aajkal dated 26 May 1995 and The Telegraph dated 21 May 1995 Annexure VI: Appeal from S. Mukherjee, and Md Alangir
Date Added: 11/21/2018, 11:24:44 AM
Modified: 6/7/2019, 11:04:39 AM
Notes:
Also present in collection: handwritten draft of report signed Indrani Dasgupta on 31 May 1995 - 10 page(s)
Legal Compensation Case Follow up of No 4 Rail Bridge Collapse - handwritten, unsigned, undated, 1 page(s)
Related:
Fact Finding by Calcutta 36 Organisation on 8 June 1995
Letter to The Superintendent, National Medical College & Hospital, Calcutta
List of Females who Received One Sari Each as Part of Relief at Park Circus No 4 Bridge on 22.05.95

Letter to Official in Charge (OC), Beniapukur PS
Type: Letter
Author: Probir Das
Abstract: Complaint regarding joint attack of antisocials and police on 7th Jan 1997 early in the morning on residents of New Tiljala community and demanding arrest of Aslam (leader of the antisocials) and suspension of involved policemen. Written by member of Tiljala Bustee Ounnan Samity
Date: 08 Jan 1997
Language : Bengali
Call Number: NTJ199705
Extra: 1 page
Type: Handwritten
Date Added: 6/6/2019, 12:33:36 PM
Modified: 6/17/2019, 2:46:22 PM

Lists, forms, reports and signatures. That’s where names proliferate.

What use is an archive? To remember everything, I want to say. But is an archive really a place of memory or its very antithesis – a monument to our anxieties about memory? In its modern form, which goes back to the 19th century, the institution of the archive has enjoyed a close relationship to the state and has, in effect, been the institution through which the logic of the state is molded into evidence and history. This often inscrutable process is steeped in violence, in which the archive has as much been an instrument of erasure as a place of remembering and reaffirming. And even in the most honest and inclusive of archives, the very fact of archivization stills and contains memory and its traces within regimes of power and domination.

If memory resides in the archive it does so as an act of the imagination. It is commonly assumed that the archive is concerned primarily with the past, as the site where the past is domiciled and controlled, a kind of Angelus Novus³. But the past has to be imagined out of the archive as an assemblage of fragments. The archive offers a number of traces and residues, the ingredients using which narratives of the past can be fabricated. This fabrication can only ever, however, be a conversation between the past, present and future. Against the idea of the archive capturing, containing and circumscribing the past, what we need are archives that face towards the future Archives not defined by what they contain (the ‘past’) but the lifeworlds and communities they can conjure, their imagined and unimagineable uses, by histories yet to come into being.

In such an archive, that which is absent, that which remains outside of the grasp of our techniques of capture and containment is as important as what the archive contains. It is precisely in this tension between the archive and that which signals its impossibility, that which eludes and evades it, can we hope to glimpse the past.

¹ Cat Lambert, ‘The Ancient Entomological Bookworm’. 2020. Arethusa 53(1). 1-24.
² This section juxtaposes an archival document about a formal informal settlement in Kadapara with my own observations of the site in 2019.
³ In his landmark essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ Walter Benjamin offers up this memorable reading of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, as a metaphor for historical materialism’s conception of the past:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.