From South Asian Print to the Digital Archive: The Quest for Access and Sustainability

Abstract

This essay examines the challenges involving the creation of and access to digital content and those faced by smaller nineteenth-century publishers in South Asia. Rather than seeing the digital arena of online publishing as representing a break with preceding periods and technologies, this article argues that, as during the period of print’s expansion in colonial India towards the end of the nineteenth century, the digital arena is at its core an ongoing experiment in which legislation and regulations, readers, publishers, libraries, pirates and business interests continue to play off one another in a metaphorical dance through which the digital publishing landscape is created. For those in late colonial India who sought to enter the world of print and for contemporary efforts to make digitised materials available online alike, the quest for fiscal sustainability has been one of the greatest challenges. By combining an examination of the Urdu writer Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar’s (1860–1926) struggles in publishing the monthly periodical, Dil Gudāz, between 1887 and 1934 with the challenges faced by online archives today, this essay teases out parallels and differences. I argue that the ability of smaller presses to thrive in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dependent on a responsive public that accepted its newfound role as patrons, whereas in the present, private donations and grants are the crucial ingredients that can help ensure collaborations achieve their goals.

Keywords:

• Digital libraries
• piracy
• print
• publishing
• South Asia
• Urdu

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Sayyid ‘Abdu’l-Ḥayy, Dihlī aur us kē Aṯrāf: Ēk Safarnāmah aur Rōznāmah Unniswīn Ṣadī kē Āḳhir mēñ, as cited in Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 205–6.

2. While this is technically true, knowledge of where to go online to find such resources is necessary.

3. Sang-e Meel and Asian Book Services are two of the prominent publishers that exemplify this trend.

4. There are many other examples of online digital archives. Space here does not permit a fuller examination of these, but several notable examples of open access digital publishing include the following: OpenEdition’s mission statement can be found at https://www.openedition.org/6438; Europeana [https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en, accessed 1 April 2020]; Digital Public Library of America (DLPA) [https://dp.la/, accessed 1 April 2020]; and Hathi Trust at https://www.hathitrust.org.

5. For a fuller account of what happened with this well-intentioned project, see James Somers, ‘Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria’, in The Atlantic (20 April 2017) [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/, accessed 1 June 2019].

6. As of the time of writing this essay, the contents of the Digital Library of India have been transferred to the National Digital Library of India (NDLI), but they are waiting for inter-ministry approval as the DLI was supported by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the NDLI is supported by the Ministry of Human Resource Development. I want to thank Dr. Partha Pratim Das (joint principal investigator for the National Digital Library of India Project) for this information. Email communication with Dr. Partha Pratim Das, 21 Dec. 2019.

7. Aruna Magier, ‘Online Research Resources for South Asian History’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (30 July 2018) [https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-173, accessed 1 June 2019].

8. Byron Acohido, ‘Amazon Opens Pages to Perusal’, USA Today (27 Oct. 2003) [https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-10-26-amazon_x.htm, accessed 24 July 2019].

9. It is worth noting that most library budgets, at least within North America, have not kept pace with the increasing costs of materials. Thus, while a university might have a large endowment, this does not necessarily mean the library has access to the funds needed to pursue worthwhile projects.

10. Dennis Tenen and Maxwell Foxman, ‘Book Piracy as Peer Preservation’, in Computational Culture, Vol. 4 (Nov. 2014) [http://computationalculture.net/book-piracy-as-peer-preservation/, accessed 10 May 2019].

11. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 92; Paul DiMaggio, Eszter Hargittai, W. Russell Neuman and John P. Robinson, ‘Social Implications of the Internet’, in Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 27 (Jan. 2001), p. 320; Zizi Papacharissi, ‘The Virtual Sphere: The Internet as a Public Sphere’, in New Media & Society, Vol. 4, no. 1 (2002), pp. 9–27; and Craig Calhoun, ‘Information Technology and the International Public Sphere’, in Douglas Schuler and Peter Day (eds), Shaping the Network Society: The New Role of Civil Society in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 229–52.

12. Internet Archive [https://archive.org/about/, accessed 24 Mar. 2020]. For more recent legal issues facing Internet Archive and its practice of ‘controlled digital lending’, see The Society of Authors, ‘Open Letter to Internet Archive About “Controlled Digital Lending”’ [https://form.jotformeu.com/90131857822356, accessed 9 May 2019]. Also see a similar letter: The Authors Guild, ‘Open Letter to Internet Archive and Other Proponents of “Controlled Digital Lending”’ [https://form.jotformeu.com/90131857822356, accessed 9 May 2019].

13. Brian R. Day, ‘In Defense of Copyright: Creativity, Record Labels, and the Future of Music’, in Seton Hall Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law, Vol. 21, no. 1 (2011), pp. 61–104; and William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

14. For more details, see Gretchen Kell, ‘Why UC Split with Publishing Giant Elsevier’, in University of California News (6 Mar. 2019) [https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-uc-split-publishing-giant-elsevier, accessed 9 May 2019].

15. Started in 2012, the Rekhta Foundation seeks to promote Urdu language, literature and culture through its online platform [https://rekhtafoundation.org/, accessed 15 May 2019].

16. While the number seems small today, it was one of the more widely circulating Urdu-language periodicals of its time.

17. Shaikh Abdul Qadir, Urdu Literature of the Nineteenth Century (Lahore: M.N. Humayun, 1941 [1898]), pp. 78–9.

18. ‘Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar, ‘Bad Qismat Zubān-e Urdū’, in Dil Gudāz (Sept. 1904), p. 16.

19. A Collection of Statutes Relating to India, Vol. 1 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1899), pp. 227–8.

20. Ibid., pp. 195–6; and Kala Thairani, Copyright: The Indian Experience (Ahmedabad: Allied Publishers, 1987), p. 1.

21. ‘A Collection of Statutes Relating to India’, p. 195.

22. Priya Joshi, ‘Reading in the Public Eye: The Circulation of Fiction in Indian Libraries, c. 1835–1900’, in Stuart H. Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (eds), India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), p. 293. There are surprising similarities here with the United States’ federal programme, PL 480, by which India and Pakistan would repay the USA for grain with books. For more, see in this issue Gwendolyn S. Kirk, ‘The Books in the Bunker: Global Flows of Meaning and Matter in Academic Assemblages’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 3, DOI 10.1080/00856401.2020.1745466.

23. Ulrike Stark, An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007), p. 88.

24. Joshi, ‘Reading in the Public Eye’, p. 293.

25. Stark, An Empire of Books, p. 90.

26. Within South Asia, the idea of authorship was not always confined to a singular historical author, but often could encompass ideas of corporate authorship over long periods of time. For a closer look at ideas of corporate authorship, see Christian Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

27. The word qaum can be defined in different ways according to the context. It can be nation, tribe or people. For a fuller exploration of the changing meanings of qaum, see C. Ryan Perkins, ‘Partitioning History: The Creation of an Islamī Pablik in Late Colonial India, c. 1880–1920’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA, 2011, pp. 59–68.

28. ‘Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar, ‘Ham aur Hamārī Ġhaibat’, in Dil Gudāz (Mar. 1897), p. 3.

29. ‘Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar, ‘Ẓarūrī Iṯilā‘’, in Dil Gudāz (June 1897), p. 16.

30. ‘Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar, ‘Ahl-e Maṯāba‘Ẓarūr Mulāḥiẕa Farmā’ie’, in Dil Gudāz (Feb. 1900), p. 16.

31. ‘Library.nu admin., “The website is shutting down due to legal shit from the publishing industry : (, no futher comment [sic]”’, Reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/ppfwc/librarynu_admin_the_website_is_shutting_down_due/, archived on 10 Jan. 2014], as cited in Dennis Tenen and Maxwell Foxman, ‘Book Piracy as Peer Preservation’, in Computational Culture, Vol. 4 (9 Nov. 2014), p. 7. This link is no longer working.

32. Ibid., p. 8.

33. For a fuller account and history of Gigapedia/LNU and Library Genesis (referred to in their work as Aleph), see Tenen and Foxman, ‘Book Piracy as Peer Preservation’.

34. Quirin Schiermeier, ‘Pirate Research-Paper Sites Play Hide-and-Seek with Publishers’ (4 Dec. 2015) [https://www.nature.com/news/pirate-research-paper-sites-play-hide-and-seek-with-publishers-1.18876, accessed 1 June 2019]; and Ernesto Van der Sar, ‘Sci-Hub, BookFi and LibGen Resurface After Being Shut Down’, TorrentFreak (21 Nov. 2015) [https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-and-libgen-resurface-after-being-shut-down-151121/, accessed 1 June 2019].

35. For a list of its partners, see Adam Matthew [https://www.amdigital.co.uk/about/archive-partnerships/our-partners, accessed 1 June 2019].

36. Adam Matthew is unable to provide exact pricing for public dissemination because its business model is built upon a ‘a tailored pricing structure that considers factors such as FTE, budget, research and language specialisms at the institution’. This information is from personal correspondence via email with an Adam Matthew representative, 5 June 2019.

37. While universities in South Asia may not comprise a large subscriber base for Adam Matthew, one example of the way in which the organisation has tried to address access-related concerns is by providing the National Archive of India with free access to the East India Company resource [https://www.amdigital.co.uk/primary-sources/east-india-company, accessed 1 April 2020] since September 2017. It has also been working closely with the British Library and India Office Records and has agreed with the British Library that free onsite access could be provided for national archives in the relevant regions. Upon receiving a request from the National Document Centre of Pakistan, it offered to facilitate access. Adam Matthew has also worked with national consortia in order to help make their products affordable. The Egyptian Knowledge Bank negotiated a deal for collections focused on the Middle East that are now available in all public schools, libraries, colleges and universities in that country. The Apartheid South Africa collection [https://www.amdigital.co.uk/primary-sources/apartheid-south-africa-1948-1980, accessed 1 April 2020], sourced from The National Archives, UK, was offered to the National Archives of South Africa free of charge. The American Indian Newspapers collection [https://www.amdigital.co.uk/primary-sources/american-indian-newspapers, accessed 1 April 2020] is available free to all tribal colleges, which was seen as an important end goal of the project by both Adam Matthew and the source archives. This precedent is one that Adam Matthew is keen to build upon whereby charging access fees allows for material in Western archives to be digitally repatriated free of charge to groups around the world. While there are drawbacks to commercial partnerships, the advantages as communicated by an Adam Matthew representative include royalty payments to the holding institution that can be used to fund future in-house projects, large digital collections that are sustainable and funded by the publisher, and access to material that would otherwise remain undigitised and require a trip to the archive.

38. For a list of members, see CRL (Center for Research Libraries) [https://www.crl.edu/samp/oai-members, accessed 1 June 2019]. For more information, see CRL [https://www.crl.edu/south-asia-open-archives-saoa, accessed 29 July 2019].

39. CRL [https://www.jstor.org/site/saoa/, accessed 24 Mar. 2020]. For more information on the partnership between the CRL and JSTOR, see CRL [https://www.crl.edu/news/crl-and-jstor-partner-make-south-asian-materials-openly-available-online, accessed 24 Mar. 2020].

40. CRL [https://www.crl.edu/how-become-member-saoa, accessed 29 July 2019].

41. For a history of SAMP, see Jack C. Wells, ‘The South Asia Microform Project’ [https://www.crl.edu/area-studies/samp/membership-information/project-history, accessed 29 July 2019].

42. For more details, see Endangered Archives Programme, British Library [https://eap.bl.uk/about, accessed 24 Aug. 2019].

43. Chadaṅgu [17th century], Endangered Archives Programme, British Library [https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP584-6-2#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=7&xywh=1193%2C470%2C523%2C410, accessed 24 Aug. 2019].

44. It is also worth noting that for many development teams, once a project is ‘completed’, resources are devoted to new projects, making remediation a low priority.

45. One prominent example that underscores the delicate balance between private funding and sustainability is the 1947 Partition Archive. Through ‘citizen historians’ (volunteers trained to conduct oral history interviews), it has collected over 9,000 video interviews with survivors of Partition [https://www.1947partitionarchive.org/collect_stories, accessed 1 April 2020]. In 2017, the Partition Archive and Stanford Libraries entered into a formal partnership with the goal of using Stanford’s Spotlight Exhibit platform to provide access to this archive of interviews [https://exhibits.stanford.edu/1947-partition, accessed 1 April 2020]. One of the biggest challenges for bringing these interviews online relates to funding. The Partition Archive has been able to train citizen historians to collect oral histories and most of the interviews are crowdsourced, but in order to make the interviews searchable, metadata is needed for each interview and this entails someone listening to each interview in its entirety and creating the metadata in the appropriate format so that digital ingest can follow. Considering that interviews can run to more than three hours, the time involved in making even a dozen interviews ready for ingest and delivery to patrons is significant. While the Partition Archive continues to seek outside funding for its many operational costs, funding for the creation of the metadata, ingest and online delivery of the interviews has been lacking.

46. One prominent example is the new agreement between the University of California and Cambridge University Press, whereby scholarship produced by members of the university system is open access. See Gretchen Kell, ‘Post-Elsevier Breakup, New Publishing Agreement “a Win for Everyone”’, Berkeley News (10 April 2019) [https://news.berkeley.edu/story_jump/post-elsevier-breakup-new-publishing-agreement-a-win-for-everyone/, accessed 11 Feb. 2020]; and Library Communications, ‘Breaking: University of California Agrees to “Transformative” Open Access Deal with Cambridge University Press’, University of California Berkeley Library News (10 April 2019) [https://news.lib.berkeley.edu/uc-cambridge, accessed 11 Feb. 2020].

47. Stark, An Empire of Books, pp. 353, 80. Even the well-studied Urdu newspaper of its time, Avadh Akhbar, never exceeded 850 copies in circulation in the nineteenth century. Of course, these numbers are not an accurate reflection of actual readership since printed materials were widely recirculated and read aloud in private homes and public settings. The actual number of people who had some form of interaction with the text would have been much higher.

48. ‘Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar, ‘Voh Bhūle Hamko Baiṭhe Haiñ Jinheñ Ham Yād Karte Haiñ’, in Dil Gudāz (Jan. 1890), p. 16.

49. ‘Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar, ‘Ek Na'ī aur Muhazzib Tadbīr’, in Dil Gudāz (Feb. 1890), pp. 15–6.

50. Ibid.

51. ‘Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar, ‘Ẓarūr Mulāḥaẕa Ho’, in Dil Gudāz (June 1890), p. 16.

52. ‘Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar, ‘Ḥaẓrāt’, in Dil Gudāz (Aug. 1890), p. 15.

53. ‘Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar, ‘Ḥaẓrāt-e Nāẓ-irīn’, in Dil Gudāz (Mar. 1891), p. 16.

54. ‘Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar, ‘Hamārī Sar Guzasht’, in Dil Gudāz (Jan. 1906), p. 16.

55. C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 217–20; Anindita Ghosh, ‘Cheap Books, “Bad” Books: Contesting Print-Cultures in Colonial Bengal’, in South Asia Research, Vol. 18, no. 2 (1998), pp. 173–94; Aditya Kumar Ohdedar, The Growth of the Library in Modern India: 1498–1836 (Calcutta: World Press, 1966), pp. 220–1; and Stark, An Empire of Books, pp. 194–205.

56. Anindita Ghosh, ‘An Uncertain “Coming of the Book”: Early Print Cultures in Colonial India’, Book History, Vol. 6 (2003), p. 30.

57. Stark, An Empire of Books, p. 203.

58. ‘Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar, ‘Dil Gudāz aur us kā Liṭeraichur’, in Dil Gudāz (May 1905), p. 24.

59. ‘Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar, ‘Urdū ke Majān be Dard’, in Dil Gudāz (Oct. 1915), p. 240.

60. ‘Abdul Ḥalīm Sharar, ‘Nukta Sanjān-e Bazm-e Suḳhan’, in Dil Gudāz (Feb. 1916), p. 47.

61. Ibid., pp. 47–8.

62. C. Ryan Perkins, ‘From the Meḥfil to the Printed Word: Public Debate and Discourse in Late Colonial India’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 50, no. 2 (2013), pp. 55–9.

63. Joseph Warren, A Backward Glance at Fifteen Years of Missionary Life in North India (Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1856), p. 45.