Devarati Chakrabarti

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will develop a series of scholarly essays, curated walks and structured writing workshops, drawing from the archival materials from the Photo Archive available at the Institut Français de Pondichéry (IFP). The essays will critically explore Pondicherry as a site of tourism and history with the aid of the picture postcards and photographs available at the IFP archives. The project is a collaboration with the IFP, a Franco-Indian research institution set up in 1955. By facilitating and undertaking research across the various disciplines of the natural and human sciences, IFP’s archival collections have grown to include a variety of materials like photographs, manuscripts, maps, herbarium specimens and pollen grains that have played an indispensable role in guiding and enriching research. Devarati Chakrabarti is the Project Coordinator for this project.

Devarati Chakrabarti is based out of New Delhi and is currently working as a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University. Devarati has an MA in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics (2019). Since 2021, she has also been participating in a series of short courses and summer schools on fiction, poetry, and translation. A common thread that runs through and informs her interest in anthropology, fiction, and translation is an enduring fascination with the rich, granular, and chaotic life of details that one encounters in the archive. She has previously worked on a project that explored the varied forms of labour involved in the production of leisure, and the ways in which value comes to be attached to a heritage building through an ethnographic study of heritage tours and travels in Old Delhi. At present she is also learning Beginners-1 level Tamil through an online course being offered by the Language Centre, SOAS, University of London. Given her experiences Devarati is best suited to be the Project Coordinator for this Foundation Project of IFA.

For this Foundation Project, Devarati situates the inquiry primarily in the IFP Photo Archive, but in the process, she also hopes to study the materials and collections at the STARS archive at IFP, and other collections that are documented as published books or open-access catalogues. The prospect of getting to work with picture postcards from French India from the early twentieth century and the archival photographs of streetscapes and tourist and heritage sites of Pondicherry informed the Project Coordinator’s scholarly intervention into the IFP archives. The scholarly essays intend to explore the site and history of a tourism site like Pondicherry by situating it at the intersections of three broad thematic frames of heritage and tourism; everyday life and leisure; and waste, value, and the materiality of the archive. The Project Coordinator aspires to study archival photographs of heritage buildings and tourist sites in Pondicherry, to probe into where and how leisure is temporally, spatially, and intersubjectively situated in archival photographs. One of the most crucial lines of inquiry of this Foundation Project is also to question, how an archive of this nature enables to draw upon a history of tourism and of what kind. 

Devarati has divided the one year term of the project into phases of fieldwork to visit the archives, preparation towards structuring of the essays and working towards the final draft. In addition, she plans to organise writing workshops, whose planning will commence after her initial fieldwork, with the final workshops scheduled for the last four months of the project.

The outcomes of the project will be a series of essays, and participatory activities that can take the form of curated walks and structured writing workshops in line with the theme of the essays. These will invite participants to interactively engage with the contents of the Photo Archive. The workshops align with the programmatic vision to energise archives as a community space through which it becomes possible to imagine diverse and plural ways of history writing. She also hopes to create a small booklet/ brochure/ guide to the collection of archival photographs of the streetscapes of Pondicherry that visitors to the institute can access. 

The Project Coordinator’s deliverables along with the final reports will be the scholarly essays, outcomes from the workshop, photographs from the curated tours and the brochure. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees. 

This Foundation Project is implemented by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), under the Archives and Museums programme, in collaboration with Institut Français de Pondichéry (IFP). It is made possible with support from Tata Trusts, with the corpus interest of an earlier seed grant.