Re-possessing Her-story: A Reflection on “Queer” Archiving

by
Apala Kundu

My scholarly interest in migration as a phenomenon and as a way of life has largely been fed by my repeated exposure to the oral narratives of my maternal grandparents’ migrations, from what was at that juncture in history designated East Pakistan to the newly emergent India, during the traumatic historical event called the Partition. Growing up, I would often solicit re-tellings of these narratives, both fascinated and bewildered, struggling to make sense of ideas such as homelessness and resettlement, identity and community, mobility and stasis. While textual history books at school did provide me with objective information about the event, these personal stories helped to better contextualize it for me, allowing for a deeper, more complex and more nuanced understanding of the workings of British colonialism within India.

Another experience of postcolonial mobility came through my first reading of Mauritian-French author Nathacha Appanah’s (2010) translated novel The Last Brother during early 2020, when we had just been restricted to our homes by the global pandemic. The novel is a beautiful retrospective rendition of the fraternal relationship that developed between two young boys, Raj and David, on the island of Mauritius during the Second World War. David dies young, and Raj finds himself reminiscing about their bond in his old age. It is at this point that Raj goes to the local library, and on riffling through the old newspaper collection there, comes across a brief report that reveals the history behind David’s appearance on the island.

These experiences compelled me to acknowledge that the history of empire and its affiliated processes, its impact and consequences on the lives of those who encountered it and lived through it, have been long documented, recorded, and preserved in more modes and forms than just literature, contemporary or otherwise. There are colonial documents and records, correspondence, photographs, paintings, postcards, memoirs, oral histories, testimonies, ethnographic accounts and a whole range of other sources that can and do voice this history. Given the multiplicity and diversity though, not just in terms of sheer numbers, but also in terms of other qualitative factors such as authorship and genre or form, it is clear that there is no one singular or objective history with which we are dealing. There are a multitude of lived histories with which to interact and sift through, a multiplicity of perspectives and interpretations or readings we must submit ourselves to, if we are to even attempt a holistic understanding of these colonial processes, and we have housed this multitude in archives that we have constructed for ourselves.

Indeed, as Bastian et al. argue, early colonial explorers “perceived detailed recordkeeping as a vital matter of life and death” (2018, 2). Not surprising then, that “[a]rchives and records, as representatives, containers, and promulgators of official actions, have always been central to the colonial enterprise” (Bastian et al. 2018, 2). And it is this centrality that has led to the gradual but pertinent recognition of archives as contested sites of power. As I began looking for and into archives pertaining to a particular strand of postcolonial mobility in the Indian Ocean—the South Asian indentured labor or “coolie” diaspora—I became aware and mindful of the power hierarchies that archives, as colonial constructs themselves, are implicated within, and the discourses of oppression or inequality that they often perpetuate or contribute to. 

Crispin Bates (2017), historian of colonial histories of South Asia, in “Some Thoughts on the Representation and Misrepresentation of the Colonial South Asian Labour Diaspora,” acknowledges for instance, how the coloniality inherent in the construction and functioning of archives has led to the predominance of certain misrepresentative migration myths surrounding the experiences of the colonial South Asian indentured labor diaspora. Examples include how the colonized Indian indentured labor population has traditionally been seen as oppressed and devoid of any agency, or the simple categorization of “first-wave” migrants as hailing from the uneducated, unskilled lower classes. Such misrepresentations, he asserts, “arguably tell us more about the subjectivity of the colonial observer than of the subaltern migrant. These representations are heavily influenced by past prejudices, by present day methodological approaches, and by biases and omissions within the colonial archive” (Bates 2017, 7). One of the migration myths that Bates actively debunks in this article, through his own archival collection of statistics, is that most Indian laboring migrants were men.

As a graduate research scholar engaged in the discipline of literature, textual analysis of twentieth and twenty-first century postcolonial migration novels is my primary modus operandi. The gender question is an aspect of colonially inflected migration trajectories within the Indian Ocean that I had not confronted from a critical perspective while going about my literary research. In most of the literary fictional pieces I read during the initial phase of my work, women, particularly colonized and/or migrant women, were at most subordinate characters playing supporting roles. The character of Raj in Appanah’s (2010) novel, for instance, was the child of South Asian parents who had been brought into Mauritius as indentured labor, but as readers we are not shown much from that piece of his history, especially from his mother’s perspective.

However, Bates’ version of coolitude history intrigued me. Bates writes that,

From 1842 onwards colonial regulations stated that 40% of migrants should be women. Although this figure was not often reached, usually at least 20–30% of the migrants were women and in the case of Mauritius, the quota of 40% was often exceeded. By the later nineteenth century migrants frequently travelled over-seas with their entire families, determined to settle and build new lives for themselves, and the number of single female migrants increased progressively after 1900. Thus women over time made up a significant portion of the overall migrant population. (2017, 10)

If I hadn’t yet significantly encountered colonized migrant women in literary fiction, where were they in the postcolonial history of the Indian Ocean? Would I come across them in archives of Indian Ocean coolitude? If so, what kinds of archives would they be, and how would these women be presented in the archives? What kinds of signs, traces, absences, and presences of these women would I find?

My digging into the postcolonial indentured labor diaspora across the Indian Ocean led me to discover four “archives.”^[1] The National Archives in the UK has a whole collection of records and documents pertaining to postcolonial Indian indentured labor. Through enquiries, however, I have confirmed that the collection is not digitized. The National Archives of Mauritius, particularly its section called “Case Studies,” and the Indian Immigration Archives at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Mauritius are two other archives that merit exploration. The fourth archive that I came across is the Iconothèque Historique de l’Océan Indien (IHOI),^[2] a digital iconographic archive created and maintained by the Department of Réunion, an extension of France’s geopolitical territory. It aims to preserve and make accessible to people the history of the various territories that surround and constitute the Indian Ocean. It is important to note here that settlement in the Réunion (one of the three islands that make up the Mascarene archipelago in the Indian Ocean) was first established in the seventeenth century by French colonizers and their colonized subjects, essentially making its history a colonial one (Schnepel 2018, 8).

With work at three of the earlier mentioned archives requiring on-site travel, funds, and resources that I hadn’t yet acquired with the ongoing global pandemic, I focused on the IHOI for initial research purposes. The archival component that I looked through is titled “Portraits of the Southwest Indian Ocean,” a collection of photographic portraits of people hailing from the different geopolitical territories of the Southwest Indian Ocean, concerning itself with the question of representation within the context of the colonial histories of these various territories. My study and analysis of the portraits concerned the subsection titled “Mauritius.” It was intriguing to me that five out of ten portraits in this collection featured individuals belonging to the colonized and/or migrant communities, the “other” to the colonizing “self,” and three of them depicted women.

In working with these three portraits, Bates’ cautionary voice kept echoing in my mind. Bates argues that the curation or reconstruction of subaltern histories of indentured labor migration in the Indian Ocean is possible through a “critical and properly contextual approach towards the use of colonial archives” and through recourse to “oral histories and local archives that lie as close as possible to migrant destinations in and around the Indian Ocean” (2017, 8).  The fraught position of IHOI had to be considered; despite its apparent situatedness within an Indian Ocean territory, one cannot dismiss Réunion’s complex colonial history, or the fact that presently, it is the Department of Réunion that is responsible for its upkeep.

As I closely studied these portraits (that incidentally had very minimal notes attached to them), it gradually dawned on me that in the process of working through this archive, I was simultaneously “queering” it. In their “Introduction” to Out of the Closet, into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, editors Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell classify the archive as “queer” through relationship. The self may experience “a strange sense of dislocation” in its interactions with the archive, whether in reference to the space, or the materials that constitute it (2015, 2). My queering of the archive was captured through two distinct experiences.

Stone and Cantrell are emphatic that “the archival experience is not merely intellectual but also emotional, erotic, and embodied” (2015, 9). I was accessing a digital archive. The portraits I was looking at were displayed on my laptop screen. I was seated in my own room, at my own table, in the midst of a full-blown pandemic, occupying virtual space on the web, leaving behind a trace in some form of digits or codes. But my body was not occupying archival space in the traditional way. My interplay with the images was also mediated by a machine, by digital technology. There were moments when I experienced a phantom itch to touch the images in a tangible way, but I had to suffice with running my fingers over the screen. Or I had a sudden frustrating urge to pick up an image and peer closely at it, but all I had available were the “maximize” and “minimize” buttons. And even so, the archive was only available to me while I was online. The moment I turned off my Internet connection, it disappeared. My experience of the archive thus produced an “odd” (read: queer) sense of it being simultaneously present and absent, my exchanges with it being simultaneously embodied and disassociated.

The three portraits left me puzzled and unsettled and my work with these sources left me with more questions than answers. Who captured these photographs in the first place? When exactly were they captured? All the women seem to be posed in some way. But whose gaze captures them, and freezes them in these frames? Is it the gaze of a colonizer or a member of their own community? This raises the related question of representation. To what extent are the women expressing their own identity through these portraits, or being constructed by the person behind the lens? Considering this question evoked for me the larger overarching question of the women’s visibility within their own communities as well as within the colonial public sphere. To what extent were women visible within these sectors? Did their economic status impact their visibility?

Knowing that a large part of the work I would produce on the archive was likely to be creative or speculative gave me pause. I am a student of English literature, accustomed to reading words on a page^[3]. Could I dare question the silence of colonized/immigrant women’s voices that I heard echoing through the archive, despite the very obvious presence of these portraits? Did I possess adequate expertise, knowledge, or experience to make such claims? Would it be ethical on my part as a research scholar to do so? Stone and Cantrell argue against the binary association of the “closet” with “queer” invisibility, and the archive with visibility and legibility, and demonstrate how archives also engage with erasures, elisions, omissions, silences and marginalizations by virtue of their locational situatedness, their structure and organization, their selection of materials for inclusion or exclusion, and the demographics of who administers, runs and maintains these institutions (2015, 5). They emphasize that it is in rendering visible and legible these features of the archive that one performs “queer” work. The “queerness” of such archival work becomes apparent in the way that “‘multiple normativizing frames of refer-ence’” that otherwise allow for obscurity and omissions in the archive are called out, and result in the emergence of non-normative alternatives and additions (Stone and Cantrell 2015, 8-9). It has become increasingly visible in the way that the concept of the archive has expanded over years and led to the proliferation and recognition of non-institutional counter-archives, community archives, and personal archives. It is also apparent in the way that the role of the archivist has come to be reimagined and redefined—to incorporate serious “amateur archival research” undertaken “through a work identity (alternative academia, the archivist as researcher, the dissertation project) or through the subject position (advanced graduate students or the emergent, junior scholar)” (Stone and Cantrell 2015, 10).

Stone and Cantrell suggest that expressing doubts, raising questions, and indulging in creative speculation while occupying non-traditional subject positions, to probe into archival absences, silences and omissions is a crucial aspect of performing queerness in the archives. Gaining awareness of my “queer” archival practice has helped strengthen my investment in the project as a queer-identifying research scholar. Even as I continue my work on the IHOI archive, I am invested in transitioning to on-site archival work in Mauritius and the UK as and when opportunities arise.

References

Appanah, Nathacha. 2010. The Last Brother, translated by Geoffrey Strachan. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

Bastian, Jeannette A., Stanley H. Griffin, and John A. Aarons, eds. 2018. Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader. Sacramento: Litwin Books.

Bates, Crispin. 2017. “Some Thoughts on the Representation and Misrepresentation of the Colonial South Asian Labour Diaspora.” South Asian Studies 33 (1): 7-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2017.1300372.

IHOI. n.d. “Mauritius.” In Portraits of the Southwest Indian Ocean. Accessed January 5, 2024. https://www.ihoi.org/app/photopro.sk/ihoi_expo/publi?prms_treelist=rootNode%3D%2B%25098808%26openNodes%3D%253A8810%253A8811%253A8840%253A8808%253A8813%2509%253A8814%253A8815%253A8816%253A8812%253A8817&mcpid=8814.

Schnepel, Burkhard. 2018. “Introduction.” In Connectivity in Motion: Island Hubs in the Indian Ocean World, edited by Burkhard Schnepel and Edward A. Alpers, 3-31. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stone, Amy L., and Jaime Cantrell. 2015. “Introduction: Something Queer at the Archive.” In Out of the Closet, into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, edited by Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell, 1-22. Albany: State University of New York Press.

^[1] I began work on this archival project in Spring of 2021 as part of graduate coursework. The course was ‘Interdisciplinary Methods in Literary Studies, offered by Prof. Courtney Weikle-Mills. I am deeply indebted to Prof. Weikle-Mills, and Ms. Jeanann Haas, Coordinator of Special Collections at Hillman Library of the University of Pittsburgh for their continued advice, guidance, and support towards this project.

^[2] I am also grateful to the Iconothèque Historique de l’Océan Indien (trans. Historical Icon Library of the Indian Ocean) for providing me with the site for my archival research, and for facilitating access to the actual sources of the images displayed on their online website for the purposes of scholarly research.

^[3] I am grateful to my advisor, Prof. Shalini Puri, who taught me the significance of interdisciplinarity and helped me recognize how archival studies and methodologies could support and supplement literary scholarship.

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