Google Blog: Explore the rich legacy of Hindi cinema. “Journey through our collection of over 7,000 cinema artifacts and learn from stories curated by our partners— or, play our first-ever Hindi cinema puzzle party game. And with the help of augmented reality technology, project the poster of your favorite Hindi movie anytime and anywhere.”
The Hindu: Servants of Knowledge to digitally archive Motilal Banarsidass’ out-of-copyright books. “Servants of Knowledge and Public Resource… are set to take up digital archiving of some of the publications of Motilal Banarsidass, a 120-year-old Delhi-based publisher. Motilal Banarsidass recently arrived at an agreement with Public Resource and Servants of Knowledge to create a free and open archive of all its out-of-copyright books or old books that will not be republished.”
Nagaland Page (India): Tetso College Launches Digital Language Archive At The Listener Nagaland Festival. “An initiative by Tetso College, [North East India Indigenous People’s Archive] is a comprehensive digital repository dedicated to host cultural and linguistic materials of the region and is one of the first of this kind in the region.”
New-to-me, from MIT Technology Review: The grassroots push to digitize India’s most precious documents. “The museum building houses the largest reference library for Gandhian philosophy in the state of Karnataka, and over the next year, the large assortment of books—including the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, a translation of his autobiography, Experiments with Truth, into the Kannada language, and other rare items—will be digitized and their metadata recorded before they join the Servants of Knowledge (SoK) collection on the Internet Archive.”
Scroll (India): An archive project is creating a database of Indian cities in fiction – and you can contribute to it. “The Cities in Fiction project was started by researcher Divya Ravindranath and writer, editor, and translator Apoorva Saini to build a database of real-world cities in fiction… and to see how South Asia is constructed in the fictive imagination. At present, the list primarily covers India, but Ravindranath said that suggestions have been pouring in from all over South Asia since the project’s website went live.”
Indian Express: National Film Archive of India seeks donations for digitisation, restoration of films. “National Film Archive of India, which is now a part of the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), has sought funds in the form of sponsorships and donations for carrying out film digitisation and restoration projects.”
The Vinyl Factory: Rescuing records: Archiving the UK’s biggest South Asian vinyl collection. “Having your pick of 3000 records in a dusty backroom is a crate-digger’s dream, and it’s one that Faisal Hussain has lived. The Birmingham artist is the director of the True Form Projects vinyl archive–the largest South Asian vinyl collection in the UK. Rescued by Hussain from Muhammad Ayub’s Oriental Star Agencies– a Birmingham-based store that imported Indian and Pakistani music until its closure in 2017–the collection has spent the last three years being archived by Hussain and a team of volunteers.”
Scroll (India): Before Indian classical music loses its diversity, an online project is rushing to archive it. “A sweeping, hugely ambitious online project is documenting traditional knowledge systems, pedagogy, compositions and commentaries.”
Mid-Day: Art Deco Mumbai creates exhaustive database of city architects responsible for its magnificent architecture. “Iconic buildings like Regal Cinema in Colaba or the Sona Mahal at Marine Drive may have made for terrific backgrounds for your Instagram Reels, but how much do you know about the people who made these buildings possible? Art Deco Mumbai, a not for profit organisation that documents the history of Mumbai’s Art Deco buildings, has compiled an exhaustive list of architects and designers of yore to specifically fill this gap in the city’s history.”
Indian Express: Express Impact | 15 antiquities from New York’s Met among 150 returning to India in 3-6 months: Govt. “Fifteen antiquities returned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Museum are expected to arrive in India in the next 3-6 months. Union Culture Secretary Govind Mohan, briefing reporters Sunday on the third G20 Culture Working Group meeting in Hampi, said this is the first lot of antiquities that the Met has willingly agreed to return to India.”
New-to-me, and I was alerted to its existence from a recent news article that isn’t nearly as good as this old one from Scroll.In: Not Arial or Times New Roman, Indian streets are ruled by charming homegrown fonts. “As she was walking down a street in Panjim in 2017, a shop sign caught the eye of Pooja Saxena, a typeface and graphic designer. The wooden sign, written in cursive Sans Serif font, was advertising Bentex watches and straps. It was the elaborately designed ‘B’ with its multiple curves and an eye in the middle that intrigued her. It was the perfect addition to her online project, titled India Street Lettering, where she documents street lettering and signage from across India.”
Telegraph India: Independent filmmaker sets up digital archive on Adivasis named after Father Stan Swamy. “The Stan Swamy Archive of Adivasi Narratives is available on YouTube as a repository of videos on the tribal way of life, their culture, interviews with achievers and common people from the community and the problems the Adivasis face, including displacement from agrarian land because of government projects.”
Reuters: Sidelined from academia, India’s Dalits archive caste history. “Vijay Surwade may have worked as a bank manager by day – but for five decades he spent his evenings building one of the world’s biggest archives dedicated to India’s pioneering Dalit rights campaigner BR Ambedkar.”
Mid-Day: This new podcast is developing a repository to help enthusiasts learn about artistic practices in India. “India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) launched their new podcast, The IFA Archive Podcast, this month to reach out to a wider audience and open conversations with their grantees on their projects. The organisation has provided funding to more than 750 projects, allowing the grantees to choose the most suitable medium as the outcome of their research.”
The Print (India): 80 years of qawwali in Bombay cinema — one man is archiving Hindi music’s crown jewel. “Much before Indians started grooving to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, qawwalis were a jewel in the crown in scores of Bollywood movies through five decades. It featured Muslim characters, showcased the lyricist’s poetry and quickened the pace and plot twists in the storylines. And then the qawwalis in Hindi films started to dwindle. Now, it is largely a phenomenon that has moved on to the realm of scholarly research and study. And Yousuf Saeed, has done just that with The Cinema Qawwali Project.” . I didn’t know what qawwali was, so I checked MegaGladys. The response, sourced from Wikipedia, was “Qawwali is a form of Sufi Islamic devotional singing, originating in South Asia.”
