View: Who's afraid of Spring cleaning?

The National Archives of India (NAI) are not being ‘uprooted’, as is being alleged in many quarters. The primary, old Lutyens’ NAI building will remain intact, but undergo significant upgrading and refurbishment. The present set of buildings simply does not possess the essential equipage or infrastructure indispensable for an institute that is the custodian of India’s heritage.Eventually, a new purpose-designed, state-of-the-art facility will be constructed alongside the present historic building. Manuscripts, documents and artefacts, currently housed in NAI buildings, will stay where they are, and be itemised and relocated to the new building only after it is completed. In the interim, scholars will enjoy continued access to the archives.NAI was established in Calcutta in 1891, transferred to Delhi in 1911, and shifted to the present building in 1926. Planning for the new NAI building, however, has not even started. So, critics placing the proverbial cart before the horse about the current building’s purported demolition, and purported covert agenda, is misleading. Signatories, including academics and scholars, to a letter to the NAI director, make several wrong presumptions. While their concern is natural, the paranoia is unwarranted.Many critics castigate the supposed ‘demolition’ of Parliament House, and North and South Blocks of the Secretariat, even as these iconic buildings are not going to be demolished at all. The new building costs a fraction of what repairs to the old building would have cost. It will be built with the latest technology, to last for a good, long time. GoI will save ₹1,000 crore a year on rentals alone, once the new Central Vista Redevelopment Project is functional.The other misconception stems from the insinuation that the current government is undertaking the destruction of NAI to ‘rewrite history’, and is ‘disdainful of historical expertise’. This charge is actually a pinball of arguments that shuttles between implacably hostile groups, with the focus being an intense distaste towards Narendra Modi and his government.If destroying ‘selective’ parts of NAI — and ‘Indian history’ — were a priority with the present government, what was to prevent it from having done it when it first came to power? Why would GoI build a new, expensive space for archival holdings if its intentions were agenda-driven, and if its core attitude to the archives was ‘callous’?The ideological conformity India’s Left-liberal intelligentsia demanded was their version of what is now called ‘cancel culture’. Not everyone buys into this version any more. Cancel culture, in this instance, has devolved into a mob mentality, manufacturing spurious correlations. However, the overall narrative has changed in India. The new India demands that this not-so-veiled Eurocentrism and American-centrism undergo rigorous scrutiny, no longer regarding Europe and the US as gold standards. So, there is little to fear, and much to look forward to, in the plans for the new National Archives.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/3ekM2Gb