Heptanesian Archives

For years now, I have been searching for an open source utility to create PDF files from image files, without having to use Adobe Acrobat. I have been using Acrobat in my department, in conjunction with a scanner with an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), to digitally archive thousands of documents, essays, articles and books. And as friends and colleagues will attest, I have come to spend long hours slaving over the scanner, in the service of digital archiving. In recent months my search for an alternative to using Acrobat on Windows had become desperate, especially as I cherished the idea of one day purchasing my own Automatic Document Feeder (Daku and Thiru even suggested getting me one for my birthday, but then quickly recanted on learning of the price of the gift. Bastards.). Apart from the hardware, in order to do digital archiving on my own, I needed a graphical utility, not just a command-line tool, and it had to work with Ubuntu Linux, which is my main operating system. I resented the hegemony of Adobe’s proprietary application over the production of my documents, which must remain free and open. While the Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open standard, the authoring and production of PDFs is still best done with Adobe Acrobat, which is neither open source nor freeware, though there are numerous PDF viewers available for every operating system. So after years of searching for a solution to this impasse, my belief in the ecology of free software development was redeemed by the discovery of GScan2PDF. Here is the thread on the UbuntuForums in which Jeffrey Ratcliffe answered our wishes. Now I can get to work with compiling all the various materials which have been sitting offline for several years and prepare them for distribution and publication, and make the dream of the Heptanesian Archives a reality.

A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune to finally met Svati’s occassional house-mate, Anandaroop Roy, who makes his living as a cartographer and information designer living between Poughkeepsie and Brooklyn. Roop is a map-maker whose clients include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asia Society and Yale University and who works mostly with public spatial databases and desktop design tools to produce offline and online maps. Today Roop and I went downtown to the Center for Architecture for a day-long conference on Visualising the City, a day-long conference of architects and urban designers, civic activists and media practitioners discussing and presenting visual and imaging tools for public participation in spatial planning. While much of this was a familiar utopian rhetoric about empowerment of communities and reclaiming of public spaces, along with many whizzy Flash demos of software under development, there were a number of interesting groups and projects presented.

I arrived in Chicago last night to spend a day at the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, and await the arrival of other friends and colleagues in the windy city on their way to the Madison South Asia Conference this weekend. I am appearing on a panel on Digital Humanities in South Asia in which I’ll be making a small presentation on the Crisis of the Database along with people from Chapati Mystery and the Land of Lime. The panel is Sunday 22 October from 10.30 a.m. to 12.15 p.m. — which might be considered the worst possible slot had there not also been another slot even earlier in the morning on Sunday.

In the writing of nationalist histories of the United States, it is difficult to find a more succinct statement of space as an organising metaphor of nationhood than the “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner. In his famous address of 1893 to the American Historical Association meeting during the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Turner marked the end of the “first period” of American history and the “closure of the frontier” through the successful expansion of the United States through warfare, colonial land purchases, and the spread of new networks of railways, cities, and homesteads across the North American continent in the nineteenth century. Here I consider two contemporary histories of space in the early modern United States, Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology at the Pastoral Ideal in America and William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and Great West. Read together, the work of Marx and Cronon present us with a critical counterpoint to Turner’s celebratory narrative of the frontier as the fulfillment of American manifest destiny. Cronon’s historical geography of commodity markets in Chicago and the Great West, and Marx’s literary history of the “pastoral ideal” in America, suggest a two-pronged analytical approach to the historical imagination of space in capitalist societies.

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Historian Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, whom I had known closely for the past seven years in London and Bombay, died of a sudden heart attack while at a conference on Four Cities in Modernity at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire on 23 April 2006. As a friend and mentor, his death was a great loss to me both personally and intellectually. I had looked forward to Raj’s guidance and advice as I embarked on my doctorate, which he had been urging me to pursue for many years. His last published work was “From Neighbourhood to Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Left in Bombay’s Girangaon in the Twentieth Century”, which appeared as the introductory essay in Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar’s One Hundred Years One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon: An Oral History, a project with which I was involved as editor and reader when the stories were being collected in 1999-2000.

Historians Douglas Haynes and Subho Basu penned “Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (1953-2006): An Intellectual Biography” for the Economic & Political Weekly in Bombay in June 2006, which we republished on Wikipedia. Along with Raj’s friends and students, we also proposed a roundtable in for the Association for Asian Studies meeting in Boston from 22-25 March 2007, which has just been accepted for the conference. This roundtable, in memory of Raj, will be chaired by Frank Conlon and includes myself, Nikhil Rao, Subho Basu, Douglas Haynes, Lisa Trivedi and Samita Sen. Here is our abstract for Labour Space and Politics: Rajnarayan Chandavarkar and the History of Modern South Asia:

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar was one of the foremost scholars of urban and working class history writing on South Asia. His sudden death in April 2006 has been an inestimable loss to the academic community. The empirical depth of Chandavarkar’s scholarship stood out amongst his contemporaries. The impact of his work on the field remains to be assessed.

This roundtable will focus on several areas where Chandavarkar’s contributions remain significant and offer new directions for future scholarship. His challenge to universalising narratives of world capitalism opened up new ways of understanding the social spaces, political choices and organising strategies of urban working classes. Larger formations such as class and nationalist politics articulated with everyday relations amongst women, migrants and the urban poor. The earlier importance given to the workplace as the primary site of class mobilisation gave way to a wider understanding of how the spaces of the neighbourhood and countryside enabled workers to engage in urban politics. His attention to social organisation emphasised the shifting nature of class and community identities in the context of mass action, challenging functionalist conceptions of social structure and political agency.

This roundtable will situate Chandavarkar’s wide-ranging contributions to the historiography of modern South Asia, addressing critiques of his work as well as areas where his interpretations have gained acceptance. This roundtable also points to new directions which his work and mentorship have helped shape amongst his peers and colleagues. The participants include senior historians, younger scholars, and Chandavarkar’s former students from the U.S., U.K. and India.