PaRChA: Pamphlet Repository for Changing Activism

by J-T.M. · Published November 24, 2019 · Updated July 30, 2020

<< This post gives an overall presentation of the PaRChA archive, the rationale behind it and the content it hosts. The database acts as the archival backbone of exhibition Memories of Change. Its content is freely accessible below.

Table of contents
1.Introduction
2.Content overview
3.Guidelines to access

Introduction

The PaRChA project started to answer a simple question. How to understand Indian activism, its history, and the language their actors developed in last decades without having a close look to their everyday writings? Well, it’s impossible. The initiative, accessible upon free registration is therefore progressively setting up a platform for referencing material on different protest movements in the country. This digital library offers full searchable content to scholars, concerned individuals and activists. The first database released in September 2015 to the general public gathers pamphlets, posters, leaflets, manifestos, reports, letters and press releases produced by students’ organisations in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The 72430 items (95% published by now) cover the period 1975-2015 and are indexed according to their author (organisational or institutional) and approximate year of release. The idea behind the project is to collect, enlarge, and offer quantitative and qualitative tools of analysis for this printed material through associating scanned images with their related text.

The “Pamphlet Repository for Changing Activism” (PaRChA) project emphacises on recovered documents such as pamphlets, posters, leaflets, manifestos, reports, letters and press releases produced by students’ organisations. The features of the database include an indexing of the documents according to the organisation that authored them (and also depending on the year they were published). The PaRChA plateform offers the possibility to search the content of the documents, and for that purpose digitization includes optical character recognition (OCR) in order to allow extraction of text from the printed material.

By now, the archive contains around 70000 documents covering four decades (1975-2015) of the political life of Jawaharlal Nehru University. The idea behind the project is to gather archival material of student organisations such as AISA (All India Students Association, student branch of Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist CPI-ML), SFI (Students’ Federation of India, student branch of Communist Party of India Marxist CPI-M), DSF (Democratic Students’ Federation, associated to Left Collective), DSU (Democratic Students Union, supporter of the Communist Party of India Maoist CPI(Maoist)), AISF (All India Students Federation, student branch of Communist Party of India CPI), ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, student wing of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh RSS), NSUI (National Students’ Union Of India, student branch of the Indian National Congress). PaRChA also comprises material released by elected student representatives in bodies like JNUSU (JNU Stundent Union) and GSCASH (Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment) as well as teacher representatives in the JNUTA (Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers’ Association).

Here is what you get when accessing the PaRChA gallery:

• An optimised display of the searched document and its textual content. Each document’s picture and its associated text are posted to the PaRChA database simultaneously, allowing you to hunt through the vast catalogue using the site’s search tool.
• A platform that allows customised search options; including the ability to search using multiple keywords directly in the content of pamphlets, but also to select tags listing authors and year of release, and the possibility to use including and excluding terms.
• Total freedom to download documents (one at the time), publish and re-post pictures of the PaRChA project as long as you cite the original source.

“Recovering Those Writings on the Wall”: Presentation of the PaRChA project, a new Database on Indian Activism

The presentation aims at explaining how the creation of a digital archive and the use of tools of textual analysis can help to assess youthful dissent in India. As part of my doctoral project, I have been collecting and digitising since 2013 a large corpus (around 70,000 documents) of pamphlets, posters, leaflets, manifestos, reports, letters and press releases produced by student organisations of national and regional parties over four decades (1973-2015). They were collected in Jawaharlal Nehru University, a leading university in New Delhi, India.

My ambition is twofold. First, I would like to detail the various steps leading to the creation on the “Pamphlet Repository for Changing Activism” (PaRChA)[1] on Flickr, a free image hosting platform. I will give an overview of the database and compare some of its features with British Library’s Flickr Commons collection. The use of optical character recognition (OCR) permits the extraction of words from the printed material contained in the PaRChA archive; it makes the huge body of texts suitable for custom searches and statistical analysis through the use of various computer-assisted tools. I used Python programming language[2] and deepened my understanding of metadata management. A more complete overview of the methods employed can be found in a recently published paper.[3]

Second, the presentation introduces advanced tools of textual analysis that can be used to analyse both the PaRChA database and already existing BL digital archives such as the Nineteenth Century Books collection. Through using the results of my statistical analysis of PaRChA pamphlets I show how these methods can give insights on the activism of Indian youth. I introduce JNU pamphleteer rhetoric and how it operationalises a vituperative type of discourse based on competitive-argumentation, slanders and truth-claiming. Moreover, I use textual statistics to help the reader to visualise changes in political leadership and the advent of new political debates in the university, which echoes those emerging in the country. The language used by pamphlet authors is a strong indication of various ideological affiliations, thus showing how written discourses are expressions of existing political cleavages in India, as they build on pre-existing ideologies embedded in the political culture of the party they belong to. This includes, among others, the caste-based assertion of formerly-called untouchables, the nationalist pride of Hindu nationalists, and the various anti-establishment rhetorics of socialist-inspired organisations.

Through concentrating on the transition of power between two communist student organisations on campus, I show how the public expression of secular Marxism differs in the way political emotions are played out. While one gives the premium on concrete welfare and student-based issues, the emphasis of its rival is on cases of social oppression. Along with its relative lack of emphasis on the betterment of daily amenities, the latter has brought about the re-enactment of ideological idioms inspired by its past as a Maoist guerrilla organisation in Bihar, a state in North India. I suggest that the variability of the emotional language of the left on campus, and the establishment of a divide between a “Marxism of reason” and a “Marxism of heart” is an important marker of differentiation between various left movements in India, which is just as meaningful as ideological cleavages and personal rivalries.

“Recovering Those Writings on the Wall”: Presentation of the PaRChA project, a new Database on Indian Activism

[1] Parcha means “pamphlet” in Hindi. The project can be accessed here: https://goo.gl/Fy1jn4 (ID: blparcha, Password: London2016).

[2] Here is a set of Python scripts I used in my PaRChA project in order to insert textual metadata in photographic renditions https://goo.gl/0Z0eRD.

[3] The link to my paper: https://goo.gl/bDA7DR. Martelli, J-T. (2016). “Historicising Student Activism and their Discourses: a Textometric Analysis”. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Statistical Analysis of Textual Data-JADT 2016, June 7th–10th 2016, Nice.

Figure 1: OCRed 1975 pamphlet and its metadata in the PaRChA archive

Figure 2: Results of the search “British + Library” in the PaRChA archive

Figure 3: Different sub-collections of the PaRChA archive ordered per authoring political organisation

Content Overview

The PaRChA archive at a glance, sorted per organisation

The PaRChA archive at a glance, sorted per year and per organisation

What can you find in the PaRChA archive? The best way to grasp that is to have a look to a concrete example! The following pamphlet, written by former student (and now professor in JNU) Kamal Chenoy brings us to one of the first political conflict in the history of JNU (https://www.flickr.com/gp/parchaproject/Y9sfYF). April 7, 1975 the first “sine die” (closure of the university) is declared after students occupied the administrative block, demanding a statutory body with student representation to address campus issues.

What JNU pamphlets talk about in one graph: campus-democracy (red), ideologised current affairs (green), social sufferance (blue), reservations (violet). Visual parsimony and statistical accuracy of correspondence analysis…striking!

Note to the self: it would be just damn interesting to further the comparative study of “symbolic politics.” In the case of JNU pamphlets (1994-2014), the student organisation that mentions B. R. Ambedkar the most is AISA, followed by Dalit/minority groups (UDSF, Ambedkar Students Organisation, BAMCEF etc.). SFI, AISF and DSF affectionate particularly the figure Jyotirao Phule. ABVP invoke both, though in smaller proportions. Of course, each ideology understands these symbols differently…this is when our qualitative approach comes in.

Wondering about the ideological and semantic features of political organisations in JNU? Thanks to the PaRChA archive you can now check this out in only one graph! Attached is a tree (i.e. a circular dendrogram) compiling the words used in pamphlets (1994-2015) that are specific to most political groups in campus.

Guidelines to Access the PaRChA Archive

Step1: Registration
As of now the perquisite to access the database is to have an account on the Flickr (yahoo) website. If you need create one you can do a free registration here.
Step2: Following the PaRChA Page
Once you are logged in the Flickr platform you can start following the PaRChA project page. The PaRChA archive is not open access as of now but might become so in the foreseeable future.
Step3: Request Access
At this stage you need to email the curator(jtm@dr.com) to request access to the archive. The activation process can take up to 72 hours but is usually much faster than that.
Step4: Browsing the Database
1) The main page of the archive: https://www.flickr.com/photos/parchaproject/
2)To look for a specific year of release: https://www.flickr.com/photos/parchaproject/albums
3)To look for a specific student political organisation: https://www.flickr.com/photos/parchaproject/collections
4)To look for specific keywords: https://www.flickr.com/search/
please note that every word of every pamphlet is searchable. For knowing a little bit more about how to refine your search experience you can have a look at this guide.

In case of a general query, or if you have any question related to the PaRChA archive, feel free to contact Jean-Thomas Martelli (jtm.martelli@gmail.com).

Link to the repository on Flickr: