The beginnings of archives in colonial India

Archives have always been more about re-collecting the future than the past. In a neglected essay titled ‘Memories of the future’ the well-known Shakespeare and Middleton scholar Gary Taylor wrote that ‘We can imagine the future only by recollecting the past’ (Taylor, 1996, 237). Archives ‘re-member’ not simply by collecting materials from the present and the past, but also by selecting and organizing them, so that each act of collecting or ‘re-collecting’ is also at the same time an act of forgetting. ‘All the futures of the past are inaccurate’, writes Taylor (Taylor, 1996, 246). Human technologies of memory are designed to overcome the limitations of bodily memory, irrespective of whether we think of the ‘body’ from the viewpoint of a ‘naive physicalism’ or a ‘naive mentalism’. One may think of the ‘memory’ as unselfconscious of visceral processes or as cognizant of the consciousness as ‘embodied’ and of the body ‘enminded’ (Searle, 1984, 13–27). Neither position would make a difference to the perceived function of technologies of memory. While our memory-machines do the remembering for us, we aim to marshal memories for our use and to fashion a memory bank for the future the way that we would like to imagine it.

Such attempts were made in western arts of memory, such as in the place-rhetoric or topoi since Aristotle and the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium (Moss, 1996, 8). In the twelfth century, Hugh of St Victor in his De arca Noe mystica raised the machine universitatis, a memorial ark which had elements of the mappa mundi and of linea generationis, on a tablet or page of a book (Carruthers, 1990, 231–9). Hamlet is probably thinking of such a tablet (or ‘table’) when he swears to erase all ‘trivial fond records’ from the ‘table of [his] … memory’ and admit ‘Within the book and volume’ of his brain only his father's commandment to seek revenge (Shakespeare, 1988, Hamlet, 1.5.98–103).1 God had inscribed his commandments to Moses in written letters, and Hamlet does likewise with his father's injunctions. Writing is an aid to cultural memory. Keeping records on clay tablets helped Ashurbanipal to centralise power and claim in 668 BCE that he was ‘King of the Universe’.