Imagine accessing the most complex part of the planet with a flick of a finger. Imagine entering rural India — ‘a continent within a sub-continent’ — with the click of a mouse. Imagine being a part of the building of such a resource. All this is true of the People’s Archive of Rural India or PARI (www.ruralindiaonline.org), which is wholly driven by volunteers.
The first of its kind anywhere in the world, both in scale and scope, PARI is both a living journal and an archive that aims to record the everyday lives of everyday people. Where else on earth would you find 833 million people, speaking 780 languages, practising thousands of occupations? Where else can you hear up to 40 languages along a 280-km route? Where else will you meet a 73-year-old librarian with 160 books in two jute bags (all classics!), deep in the jungle where wild elephants roam? Only in rural India.
However, the stories, histories and lives of rural Indians, who account for a whopping 68.84 per cent of the country’s population, are poorly — if at all — documented by a media that’s obsessed by a very narcissistic elite. It is this wide and growing gap that PARI plans to fill.
The PARI network was formed in 2011 — when work also began on the digital archive — by a group of like-minded and idealistic people, along with journalist P. Sainath, PARI’s founder. Scores of journalists, filmmakers, writers, editors, translators, lawyers and accountants gave their time and skills for free. The content they’ve put together covers large swathes of India; 60 districts from 21 states are, in some way, represented. There is a photo-feature on Kynja Bhabha, the five-year-old daughter of a broom-cultivator from Meghalaya’s East Khasi hills. There are stories that chronicle the struggles of widowed women farmers in Maharashtra; that celebrate the small but vital victories of women farmers in Wadakancherry, Kerala. And there are videos like that of Kali Veerapadran, a young Bharatanatyam and folk-arts dancer from Kovalam fishing village, in Tamil Nadu. The Tamil film is subtitled (entirely by volunteers) in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali and English.
But make no mistake! PARI isn’t just about showcasing the exotic; it is firmly about everyday lives that include the ugly, brutal, and regressive. Schools of weaving and pottery, many not even documented, are disappearing; ancient languages and tongues are dying out; epic storytellers (like Harikatha exponents) and puppeteers are out of a job, while caste atrocities are increasing. PARI will cover all that just as it will the lives of millions of migrants, who leave the countryside, and the wisdom and skills of their forefathers, and end up performing menial and repetitive jobs in the cities.
“In a sense we’re doing on PARI what I’ve done for 34 years as a journalist,” says Sainath. But PARI, he points out, is not private property; it is owned by the CounterMedia Trust, registered in 2011, and is bound by — and cannot deviate from — its ideals and objectives. One is to keep the (not-for-profit) site and its content free —to access, download and share, with appropriate acknowledgement. (PARI is registered under the Creative Commons license 4.0).
Interestingly, all the content so far — and the website itself — has been put together voluntarily. ThoughtWorks India, a global software company, has created, pro bono, an incredible, responsive platform that accommodates the seamless movement between audio, video, still photos and text-articles. Neville Roy Singham, ThoughtWorks founder-chairman remarked, “This is an insane project, and a wonderful one.”
The PARI website itself, in some ways, reflects the energy and frenzies of rural India. Everyday, new contributors write-in with new ideas; new forms of storytelling evolve. (And the site is not even fully live yet.) Audio albums are created when a photographer shares his thoughts, as audio-captions, of the time he shot the koilawallahs hauling 250kg of coal on their bicycle. Tiny videos (Little Takes) capture young tribal girls singing an ode to a potato in English, deep in the hills of Idukki, Kerala, where no English is ever spoken or heard! Often, more than one form of storytelling is used to bring a story alive. In the story about the pawari, a trumpet-like Adivasi musical instrument from the Dangs of Gujarat, a short video compliments the text article.
PARI’s content is broadly grouped into ‘categories’: ‘Things we do’ about labour and ‘Things we make’ about artisans, artists, crafts. There are categories about agriculture, sports, women, Dalits, Adivasis. And this list, though exhaustive, isn’t final; other categories, the founders say, can and will come when they have the material. But PARI already has broken new ground. There is a unique category called Faces, to which 40 photographers have contributed, even before the website has gone live. Faces — a celebration of the facial and occupational diversity of India — will include photograph of one male, one female and one child from every single district of India, along with metadata (name, occupation, village, district and details of the photographer/ camera). It was a terrific learning for the contributors to understand that you can have 100 faces and over 200 occupations, since many rural Indians do more than one thing to survive.
The website has the potential to become an even bigger learning platform for students. It will do so not by substituting for teachers, but by supplementing them. How real and raw the struggles of displacement will seem when a people, whose lives they barely connect through impersonal textbooks, speak with them directly through their computers? (Like a poet/singer/fisherman from Odisha who protests, in verse and song, against POSCO taking over their lands. How quickly they will grasp the hard realities of urban migrations, when they read about still-born dreams and stifling living conditions of teenage boys, who left behind fertile earth, to heft heavy sacks in Chennai? And what better lesson about the water crisis — nor with dry statistics — but by capturing the drama in digging a well; or hearing from girls their age who walk 40km a week to fetch water for their orange orchard.
PARI also plans to collaborate on coursework, to make culturally relevant and compelling learning material by allowing students themselves — both rural and urban — to create that content! (If students were told that their assignments would be put up on PARI, surely the quality of their work would improve.) It is already working with a few colleges and there’s a section called ‘Resources’ with official reports in full about rural India. Plus, students, especially of journalism, can find their early work published on an actual journalistic platform — a real world assignment. A ‘talking album’ on the ‘Green Army of Wadakkanchery’, for instance, was shot in 2013 by Asawari Sodhi, an undergraduate student.
Sakshi, who documented the pawari for PARI and is currently studying for the BCL degree at University of Oxford, was inspired by the fact that the archive is not merely an ethnographic project, but a political statement and an art. “PARI’s ethical protocol is remarkable,” she says, commenting on the mandate of crediting all videos first to the subject-narrator and next to their communities/village. “It is a very sincere attempt to recognise the ownership in the individuals and communities to which they belong. PARI has done a great job in acknowledging this right at the institutional level”
Contributions are not limited to students; anybody can contribute. The website seeks to grow with public participation, and people are welcome to send photographs, videos, articles, as long as they are about people’s everyday lives. But, unlike other crowd-sourced platforms, the process of curation, editing and determining whether something makes the cut or not will be far more rigorous.
PARI is also looking to crowd-fund the archive. The network is clear that it will not be dependent on governments or corporations. Once the site is up and running, and when the public can see for themselves what they will contribute towards, they hope to grow with individuals’ contributions.
But even if money, time and skills come in thick and fast, PARI, in all honesty, can never be completed. “The kind of stuff that happens in rural India,” says Sainath, “trying to capture that won’t happen in our lifetimes. We make a beginning, a start. For as long as there is a rural India, there will be something growing, changing and expanding on PARI.”
To watch the promo of PARI: >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XyEzV6BEVQ
Disclosure: Aparna Karthikeyan, a freelance writer, and Siddharth Adelkar, a software engineer, are PARI volunteers.
