Archiving the nation in the aftermath of a traumatic event

• In Event: 2247 - Armed Conflict, Displacement, and Peacemaking

Abstract

The production of archives in the aftermath of territorial annexations and wars occurs within specific historical conditions and requirements of nation formation. In this essay I am concerned with the predicaments of historical gnosis from the perspective of sovereignties that have ceased to exist.

In this essay I discuss the Archives of annexation of the erstwhile state of Hyderabad by the newly independent Union of India in 1948. Nations have a dual temporal orientation - they require a singular archive of their sovereignty and a promise of security in the future to secure their legitimacy. Archives are produced within these constraints. Yet when sovereignties disappear, their erasure creates investments in re-telling and in forgetting their histories, in the conditions that led to their erasure, and perhaps the consequences of it. The archaicization of violence is generated through a tension between the two impulses of emergent nations and of erased sovereignties. As Allen Feldman has shown us in his study of violence in Northern Ireland and South Africa, archives provide us with the vocabulary and grammar for violence and inform and stratify witnessing practices. They create the institutional history of places as official museums of suffering, of terror and of heroic transcendence thus creating conditions of intersubjectivity, reconciliation and forgetting. Historical sociology must attend to these conditions as we produce histories of genocides and nation making in the aftermath of violence.

This work derives from eighteen months of historical ethnography and archival work.

Author

• Swati Birla, University of Massachusetts Amherst