Archives Lost and Found: Exploring the Self in History
Thank you, President Bradley, and thanks to everyone here—students, colleagues, and especially members of the community—who make such great events possible. And, of course, I want to add my welcome to the Class of 2030—you have survived orientation week and the first day of classes. Maybe you have even stopped surreptitiously looking at a map and are starting to feel that you know your way around. To the seniors, you might feel that you know the campus so well that getting lost is impossible. Most of you have found your place, or really multiple places, within the Vassar community, whether it’s through academics, arts and sports, or other people and pursuits. For you, that anxiety about where to fit in may seem remote, almost like something that happened to someone else. At the same time, as you are looking ahead to life beyond Vassar, you may be anticipating that feeling of being lost and unclear as to what direction you should go. Right now, just take a deep breath—you will get there, wherever “there” is.
In thinking about what to say to you and hopefully to inspire you, I thought a lot about my own journey. I have also asked myself: “How did someone like me get here?” A question that many in this room may be familiar with—imposter syndrome. The idea of someone like me getting up in front of such an audience, such a space as Vassar College, seems unimaginable, especially when I think of the world I grew up in, where my family came from.
There are many ways of answering that question of how I got here. For me, as a historian, I look to the sources, to the archives. My scholarly research has led me to squint at the scrawled notes left by police spies who recorded “treasonous” or “sacrilegious” conversations in the cafés and taverns of eighteenth-century Paris. There is a real thrill in touching paper 300 years old. At the end of a day at the archives, you are washing the dirt off your hands, and some of that dirt is as old as the paper itself.
I could tell you about all the different things I discovered, but there is one thing I have learned while sifting through numerous cases involving clerical sexual violence. Even archives have limits. Yes, archives can be treasure chests of information, but documents don’t just appear out of nowhere, telling us what happened in the past. Individuals wrote the documents, and individuals organized them, sometimes working within institutions, like the Catholic Church. Some people, whether because of gender or status, were featured in those pages while others are just a presence—a shadow, a whisper. In other words, perhaps not intentionally, archives reveal who matters and who doesn’t, whose words have meaning and whose voices are muted, if not erased.
Most of the archives that occupy my time also don’t reveal emotion. You might think that emotions are not facts, that they don’t tell us what happened. But emotions tell us about how people experienced the events around them, how those events shaped them. Emotions are also elusive because they are, in their own way, inexpressible. For historians who love to think about change over time, emotions can be a nightmare because they are often non-linear—less like a line and more like interlocking loops without beginning or end.
But we also recognize other sources, those outside of an archive, that can help us here. Sources like literature, film, art, music. One example that has always stood out for me is the graphic novel or comic Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, who passed away late this spring. In Persepolis, Satrapi tells the story of her childhood growing up in revolutionary Teheran in the late 1970s into the 1980s. Through her images and dialogue, she showed how such experiences were fantastic and fantastical. Since its translation in the early 2000s, Persepolis has featured in Vassar’s curriculum. I myself team-taught the comic in the introductory course in Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies. In fact, Satrapi spoke right here in the Chapel just 10 years ago! As a source, Persepolis has also been very personal. Like Satrapi, I was there in Teheran in the early days of the revolution in late 1978. Like her, I saw riots in the streets and buildings going up in flames on November 5. Two days after that day, my father’s US company pulled my family out of Iran. In just 36 hours, I moved from Teheran to New Jersey, via Istanbul. It was only after I read Persepolis that I understood that I had experienced trauma. Satrapi gave shape to the sorrow and loss that haunted me for years. I will confess that every time I taught Persepolis, I had moments of PTSD. At the same time, I think this allowed me to convey to students how works like the graphic novel could be powerful vehicles for expressing what was beyond language, what was neither linear nor predictable. One minute, you’re fine, and the next you are straddling between the past and the present, your personal life and the larger historical world.
Through Persepolis, Satrapi created an archive. She showed how both our bodies and feelings themselves are archives, something more recently articulated by Irish author Clair Wills in her book Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets. Missing Persons narrates how Wills learned about one such secret: her “missing” cousin born in one of Ireland’s infamous mother-and-baby homes. Wills writes: “But we are our own archives. I am convinced that the manner in which we inherit the past—how we know about it—can tell us things about the past, and the way we live in the present, that we did not know we had at all.”
With Wills’s words in mind and mourning Satrapi, I began thinking of the archival possibilities available for me. My story is rooted in the complex strands of imperialism, independence, and diaspora that shaped the history of South Asia. I recently came face to face with this complexity while filling out the application to renew my British passport. I stopped at the question asking my parents’ country of birth. They were both born in India in the 1930s, which meant they did not have birth certificates. And there was technically no independent, national entity called India before 1947. I shot off an email to the passport officials asking how to answer this question. The response was a very polite “don’t worry about it.” I was confronted by the limits of official documents, limits reflecting the tangled history of colonization.
Taking my cue from Wills, I went to the archives I do have at my disposal: the stories of my grandmothers, both of whom I knew into adulthood. I had gotten glimpses of their childhoods and marriages through asking questions and through stories passed down in the family. Essentially, my archives were oral histories. There were some similarities between these two Bengali women who were a generation apart. My paternal grandmother, Nirmala, was about 11 and 1/2 when she was married before India’s Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, which required that girls had to be at least 14 when they were married. My maternal grandmother, Kalpana, who was about the same age as Nirmala’s eldest child, was married at 14. Both grew up in large families, and both received a primary school education.
It was Kalpana’s story that is the stuff of legend, the one I have carried with me for decades. Disliking the idea that her children, actually her son, would think her uneducated, she returned to school to get her high school degree. Three years after that, in 1955, Kalpana Devi lobbied local officials and managed to set up her own school, Madhab Nagar, for poor children where she would teach for the next 50 years. (She faked her age, which allowed her to pull it off. That, and a remarkable absence of wrinkles and gray hair.) My understanding is that some of those children would go on to get degrees. What is there not to love about this story? It even fits nicely into American narratives about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. I certainly embraced it, and it is easy to put Kalpana’s story as a major explanation for my own trajectory, that her success can help explain why I am in front of you.
But as I said earlier, my current research has taught me to think of archives, however you define them, not only as sources of knowledge but also knowledge that is produced, crafted, and curated. Some things are emphasized, while others are hidden. My grandmother’s story is tied to a modest middle-class family whose home was in Malda, eight hours north of Kolkata by train, near the border of Bangladesh. I have heard many stories about how the town went back and forth between India and East Pakistan during the frightening days of partition that overshadowed Indian independence, which resulted in the deaths of over two million people. And my grandfather, Kalpana’s husband, who had been active in the Independence movement, hid Muslim families. Again, another impressive story. However, there are things I never heard of until recently. I did not know that the male members of the family prevented my grandmother from completing her college degree, essentially telling her that enough was enough.
These fragments of information that have come my way make me realize the fragility of archives, whether in the form of written documents or accounts transmitted orally. In the case of my grandparents, I inherited narratives that were heroic. But the same narratives also disguised, not necessarily intentionally, uncomfortable truths. Such as the fact that despite my grandmother’s education and accomplishments, she lived within a patriarchal household.
But recently, I started to think about another story, that of my other grandmother, my father’s mother, Nirmala Devi. Whereas Kalpana’s name may be found in official records—a passport, if not a birth certificate, and maybe the school’s records—Nirmala Devi exists mostly in memories and family photos. Nirmala did have some education. She wrote letters, read the newspaper. But she also refused to learn English when her husband, my grandfather, offered. I have a confession to make—I found her a difficult person, uninteresting because she refused to step outside her home of three rooms and a veranda. So, it was easy to dismiss Nirmala’s refusal to learn English as a reflection of her personality and her social conservatism, the embodiment of patriarchy. But just this summer, I began to think about Nirmala through a different lens, thanks to Didier Eribon’s memoir Returning to Reims. A French philosopher and sociologist, Eribon traces the history of his working-class family in northern France. As a an academic and a gay man, Eribon was estranged from his family because of both class and culture, divisions that were insurmountable. But through his “returning,” Eribon comes to understand his father’s seeming hostility toward him. His father’s moments of intense rage and dissatisfaction were not simply about character. Rather, these moments reflected “a place and time during which the hardship and the constraints multiplied as they intersected with one another.”
My grandmother’s life was equally shaped by multiple constraints embedded in the world she occupied. Between the ages of 14 and 29, Nirmala Devi had nine children, three of whom died at a young age. But what defined her was the financial precariousness of her married home. It was all the more pronounced when compared to her father’s immense home, a compound really, that was just across the street. I always sensed my grandmother’s shame or anger about her humble marital home. Thinking about it more carefully, my grandmother inhabited a world that had been designed to keep her in the home. She was the epitome of an ideal promoted by Hindu nationalists of the late 19th century (Nirmala was, after all, born in 1906). According to this nationalist discourse, British colonialism had contaminated middle-class men through education and work. In contrast, the Hindu wife, safe within the confines of the home she never left, was a marker, although not a gatekeeper, of traditional Hindu values. Like my grandmother, who was a stickler for religious rituals.
I don’t believe my grandmother Nirmala was aware of these larger gender constructs of national identity. But she did believe, and lived according to, their principles: her supposed “subordination” to her husband; her commanding place within the contained household; and her strict adherence to Brahmanical orthodoxy. After reading Eribon’s memoir, I began to wonder if my grandmother’s life allowed for her to learn English, a language that could destabilize an existence already fragile because of precarious finances and sudden death. It wasn’t that there weren’t opportunities, but how could it benefit her, even when my father, her youngest and favorite child, moved away? If anything, it was the English and England that took him away in the early 1960s. Lately, Nirmala’s story, which is a lot of conjecture on my part, has been haunting me. It parallels my academic research, where I have come up against how archives are as much about silences as they are about being sources of information.
At this point, I would give myself a B+ because I haven’t answered the question!!! But what I discovered is that behind a seemingly simple question are complicated answers, possibilities, depending on which archives we consult. When Clair Wills says “we are our archives,” she is reminding us that we all have histories, including those histories that are undocumented or cannot be captured.
Wills’s words are also a call to action to seek out those archives, despite the silence. It’s a quest that may not be direct because not all of us have genealogies, birth certificates, or photographs, let alone diaries and letters, accessible to us. To find those archives, we need to think creatively and to make connections. As you might have noticed, my own thinking about my family’s past has been influenced by a variety of sources: books I have read, footnotes I have followed, and perhaps most of all, conversations. All of these things have, in different ways, opened up those silent archives by placing them in a larger history. What I have learned is that no matter who you are, you are adjacent to History with a capital “H.”
I envy this moment you are in, when you will have the chance to take new classes and make new friends, which will help you make such connections. I shamelessly invite you to take history classes with my wonderful colleagues, many of whom, like Professors Whitney Fields, Lydia Murdoch, or Noel Smyth, are invested in bringing out the voices that have been silenced. Their courses can help us see ourselves in history, sometimes obviously and at other times indirectly. Those latter moments are the best: When something you encounter in a language class can make you think about something you learned in a history class or elsewhere. However you make your connections, be curious, be open, and be ready to be surprised.
What you will learn in your years here at Vassar is how to ask thoughtful questions that are not just about accumulating information, but asking how that information came to be. This is not simply about all the “disinformation” out there. It is also about the collection and organization of information, which might be done in good faith, but is never neutral. You are here creating an archive that has personal meaning as well as adding to Vassar’s own archive, bringing your different pasts, different selves to write another chapter in the College’s history. Without it, the College’s history would remain shallow.
At the same time, the stories about my grandmothers indicate how pursuing our personal archives can be unexpected, even painful. When looking for our archives, we shouldn’t just scrutinize them for what we would like to see and for the stories we would like to tell. A part of the process requires that we approach the task with humility, which doesn’t mean humiliation. Rather, we must learn to sit with that discomfort, to sit with that mess. What are the questions that we are asking or failing to ask? Where do our questions come from? This kind of self-reflection reminds us that critical thinking is not simply a class exercise. It is a way of being. I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes by the late Saba Mahmood, who captures the power of critique: “Critique, I believe, is most powerful when it leaves open the possibility that we might also be remade in the process of engaging another’s worldview, that we might come to learn things that we did not already know before we undertook the engagement.”