Survey and Digital Preservation of Upcountry Tamil Archival Records

How does a community that is built on indentured labour, colonial political economy, and exploitation remember, narrate, and archive itself? The conventional historiography of the upcountry Tamil plantation community of Sri Lanka is often centered on the narratives of colonial agents and local elites. Amidst persistent hardship, exploitation, and dire living conditions, the upcountry Tamil plantation community built a dynamic culture, manifested in the forms of music, songs, dance, folk theatre, storytelling, and performance. This culture of orality, the oral forms of creating and disseminating knowledge through ephemeral records, remains a key focal element of everyday lives, often bypassing the influence of conventional written or textual forms of knowledge transition.

Where traditional histories and historiographies fail to capture the totality, complexity, and the vibrancy of such communal existence, this project envisions to seek alternative tools to document and archive that existence through visual and ephemeral archival records. Using critical ethnographic, folklore, archival science frameworks and methodologies, this project documents the grassroot histories of the Tamil plantation community, and the multifaceted ways in which those cultures have evolved into a form and mode of resilience and resistance within the community. By building a communal archive through and by the community itself, we explore the role and agency of a community in documenting itself and asserting its place in a contested geo-political-cultural space.

MEAP funding has allowed the project team to complete a collection-level inventory consisting of 207 collections(opens in a new tab) (both individual and organizational collections) from across the Upcountry region in Sri Lanka. The field team members were based at three key different geographical locations in the Upcountry - eastern, central, and western regions. The available inventory reflects the diversity of those demographics and plantation economies.

The inventory documents the following in both English and Tamil: date of survey, name of the surveyor/field researcher, title of collection, creator/guardian of collection, date(s) of collection, location of collection, country, collection summary, type of resource, extent, copyrights, and sample images from the fieldwork.