Archives and Archiving in the 21st Century

Radhika Seshan retired as Professor and Head of the Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune University (formerly the University of Pune). She is now Visiting Faculty at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune. Within the broad area of medieval Indian history, her research focuses on trade, especially in textiles, and maritime networks. Her most recent publication is a monograph, Empires of the Sea: A Brief Human History of the Indian Ocean World (2023). Her other works include Wage Earners in India 1500–1900: Regional Approaches in an International Context, jointly edited with Jan Lucassen (2021), and Connecting the Indian Ocean World – Across Sea and Land, and Merchants and Ports in the Indian Ocean World: Across Sea and Land, jointly edited with Ryuto Shimada (Routledge, 2023).

1. Introduction PART I – Documents, historiographies 2. Reconstructing Pre Modern Economic History from the Dutch Archives 3. Demystification and Digitization: India Office Records in the British Library 4. Apres Elton and Carr: History, the Historian, and the Archive 5. Reading the Colonial Archive: The Rungia Gosavi Affair in 1857 6. Contextualizing Archives; Mysorean invasions in Kerala PART II – Visual and literary 7. Archives in Tibet and their received understanding 8. Archive and Beyond: Literature as Archive/Archives in Literature 9. Nationalism, Historiography and Literature: Water and Chola history 10. History of Everyday archived in Stone and Clay: Case Studies from Early India PART III – Emerging Archives 11. The Singing of genealogies and Jati Puranas: archiving cosmologies and ethical frameworks within the universe of an Indian village 12. Uday Shankar’s Kalpana as Archive 13. Cyberspace, Archives and Investigation: An Ever-Changing Landscape