There was another India, reveals a new database of periodicals published between 1857-1947 | The Indian Express

There was another India, reveals a new database of periodicals published between 1857-1947 | The Indian Express

Written by Pratap Bhanu Mehta |Updated: November 30, 2019 12:05:14 pm

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is Contributing Editor at the Indian Express. He has been vice-chancellor of Ashoka University and president, Centre Policy Research, New Delhi, one of India's top think tanks. Before he started engaging with contemporary affairs, he taught political theory at Harvard, and briefly at JNU.  He has written extensively on intellectual history, political theory, law,  India's social transformation and world affairs. He is the recipient of the Infosys Prize, the Adisheshiah Prize and the Amartya Sen Prize.

There was another India, reveals a new database of periodicals published between 1857-1947

The database is a reminder that the big contentious debates of Indian spiritual, political, economic and social life are not often accurately reflected in the big, and conventional figures we all study or distilled in books. They surface as powerful undercurrents in a variety of genres and forms.

The prehistories of all our debates, from corruption to representative government, from caste to labour, jump out in ways that suggest that we have made fewer advances in these areas than we think.

If you want to resist the will to simplicity, the flattening of public discourse, and the potential slide into barbarism that characterises our times, you could do worse than to turn to an astonishing new resource that has for the first time been made available to the public. Rahul Sagar, an academic at NYU, and his associates have laboriously created the single most comprehensive, and searchable, database of over three lakh articles published in all Indian periodicals published in India between 1857 and 1947. The database is ideasofindia.org. This database is an astonishing act of public service. It conveys the sheer romance of what a love of ideas looks like, and the meticulous care that has to go into preserving access to them. The database is also a reminder of the way in which we have desecrated even our own recent past. Most of the amazing periodicals used in this are not available in India; and most are not accessible. It is almost as if the literal, physical rotting away of our recent heritage, is also a metaphor for the rotting away of our memories and our minds. We are obsessed with history, but not so much to deepen our understanding of how we came to be, but to ransack it for our purposes.