In India, many audiovisual archives have grown at institutions whose facilities were originally not intended for this purpose but were built as places for academic teaching and learning or for residential purposes (Chaudhuri Reference Chaudhuri, Seeger and Chaudhuri2004:143). As a result, many archives suffer from inadequate infrastructure and maintenance, putting stored analogue recording carriers at high risk of degradation. Recognising the issue, the Ministry of Culture of the Government of India sanctioned an action plan by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), an autonomous institute under the purview of the Ministry of Culture, to digitise analogue recording carriers held at the archives of governmental and non-governmental institutions and store the resulting digitised content at a central digital archiving platform and online portal, titled the National Cultural Audiovisual Archives (NCAA). The pilot phase of the project was initially envisaged to last from 2014 to 2018 but was later extended to 2021.

According to the search page of the website, the aim of the platform is “to ensure long-term access to the oral traditions, performing arts, ritual and cultural practices and traditional knowledge systems of India in audiovisual form”.Footnote ¹ While this statement gives users of the website a rough idea about the scope of the archive, the website provides no further information on what types of genres of oral traditions, performing arts, and other materials the online archive of the NCAA includes and, perhaps more importantly, how it defines the term “India” in terms of geography and culture. This omission is significant given the politicisation of the word “India” and its Sanskritic alternative “Bharat” in contemporary India.Footnote ²

The ‘about’ page of the website provides a dry summary of the project’s background, objectives, targets, and organisational structure, listing as objectives the digitisation and preservation of audiovisual documentation of “the cultural heritage of India”, creating a dedicated website offering access to these resources to the general public, standardising and periodic upgrading of methods and technologies used in the production, storage, and retrieval of audiovisual resources, capacity building in conservation, cataloguing, metadata creation, digitisation, and retrieval of audiovisual materials, and the implementation of outreach and awareness programmes.Footnote ³ For more information on the content of the archive, users need to sift through a downloadable 684-page-long detailed project report, which lists, among others, the documentation of traditional crafts and textile manufacturing practices among the project’s objectives (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, n.d.:2), something that is not obvious from the generic description of the archive given on the website. Similarly, users need to consult the project report to find out that the project entailed the creation of a mobile application called “Sangam”, providing free streaming access to nearly 4,500 audio tracks from the digital repository of the NCAA (ibid.:6).

Archives accessed during the project included those of well-known institutions focusing on the teaching, learning, and promotion of Indian classical performing arts such as the Sangeet Natak Academy (Delhi), the Kalakshetra Foundation (Chennai), the Sangeet Parishad Kashi (Varanasi), the Saptak Archives (Ahmedabad), and the Vyas Sangeet Vidyalaya (Mumbai). Moreover, the project accessed the archives of the folklore research institute Rupayan Sansthan (Jodhpur), literary organisations such as the Sahitya Akademi (Delhi), the national anthropological museum Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya (Bhopal), and the archives of the IGNCA itself that promotes research on literature, visual arts, architecture, sculpture, photography and film, and performing arts. Correspondingly, the digital content hosted on the website of the NCAA encompasses an impressive array of digitised audiovisual documentation of performances, exhibitions, seminars, and workshops on Indian classical performing arts and other regional traditions of music, dance, drama, theatre, oral literature, handicraft, painting, architecture, sculpture, photography, and film. According to the website, the total number of records in the online archive is 21,989.Footnote ⁴

The project’s pilot phase was directed by a Steering Committee comprising governmental representatives and subject experts from the fields of digital humanities, audiovisual archiving, performing arts, and folklore research associated with governmental and non-governmental organisations based in India, including the National Archives of India, the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology, Sahapedia, and different Indian universities. This inclusive approach is reflected positively in the project roadmap, which was drafted considering relevant legal frameworks and recent scholarly discourses in archival theory (e.g., Cook Reference Cook2013). The project report thus includes memoranda on Indian copyright law, best practices recommended by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) regarding the documentation of traditional cultural expressions, and references to the ethical guidelines of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and the British Library Sound Archive (BLSA) (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, n.d.:211–17). Furthermore, it includes memoranda on current practices of Open Access implemented at institutions concerned with the safeguarding of documentation of cultural heritage around the world (ibid.:253–61), the curation and use of digital cultural archives (ibid.:262–69), and recent scholarly discourses in these fields. Correspondingly, the report claims that the digitisation standards pursued by the project “are in parity with those recommended by the International Association of Sound & Audiovisual Archives (IASA)”, and that “its metadata standards are based on the extended Dublin Core metadata schema which is used by Archives, Galleries, Libraries and Museums worldwide” (ibid.:5).

The section “Key Attractions” on the search page predominantly features archival records related to Hindu culture, religion, and performing arts. Among the twelve documentaries thumbnailed in the section, ten concern Hindu personalities, Hindu ritualistic practices, or performing arts traditions drawing on Hindu mythology. Apart from this, there is one documentary about the film music composer Allah Rakha Rahman (b. 1967) who was born as a Hindu and later converted to Islam,Footnote ⁵ and one documentary about the traditional performing arts of ethnic minorities of northeast India that carries generalising, exoticising, and paternalistic overtones. Examples of cultural expressions related to the numerous other religions of India such as Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, or Zoroastrianism are conspicuously absent. Similarly, the archival records hosted on the NCAA online repository include many items concerning Hindu ritualistic practices, such as Vedic chants, of which the repository lists about 250 examples. The number of records on ritualistic practices and performance traditions associated with Muslim culture is smaller. There are a few dozen records each on Islamic prayer practices, expressions of devotion in Islam, the Quran, Sufism, and the Sufi devotional singing tradition of qavvālī, about ten on ṣūfiyāna mūsīqī, the classical music of Kashmir, but not a single record on mars̱iya, an important tradition of poetry recitation related to Indian Muslim culture. This bias towards Hindu cultural expressions is also reflected in the audio content promoted via the mobile application Sangam, arguably due to the Hindu-nationalist orientation of the current board of the IGNCA (MS Reference MS2019).

Furthermore, the content on the website has a strong focus on Indian classical performing arts because of the research scope of the partner archives involved in the project. A search for the term “Hindustani classical music” yields a whopping 8947 results, and searches for kathak and bharatanāṭyam, two important genres of Indian classical dance, yield 563 and 385 results, respectively, if the terms are entered without diacritics. Adding diacritics often results in vastly different search results, which is a significant weakness of the catalogue. The number of records related to regional performance traditions such as bāul music, kīrtan, nauṭaṅkī, paṭacitra, or paṭuẏā gān, some of the important musical and artistic traditions of northern India, is smaller, numbering up to a few dozen each. Moreover, there are a few dozen documentaries on the cultures and performing arts of South Asian Indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities such as the Santal, Gond, Bhil, Naga, Bodo, Meitei, Mizo, and others. Apart from this, there are a few hundred records on regional traditions of painting, weaving, handicraft, sculpture, and architecture from different parts of India as well as over 1,000 fiction films included in the online repository.

A significant issue of the repository is the search function that often delivers hits unrelated to search terms. Thus, searching for the term “Santal” lists not only entries with the term “Santal” and its variant “Santhal” but also those with the Hindu surname “Sanyal”. Checking the “Exact Match” tick box, on the other hand, excludes all alternative spellings of search terms. The advanced keyword search allows for some refinement, yet the haphazard terminology of the metadata complicates targeted searches, as words designating cultures, languages, and cultural traditions were not standardised and hence appear in multiple variants in the catalogue (e.g., Santal/Santhal, patachitra/pattachitra). Another problem is that the metadata does not include language codes such as ISO 639-2 or ISO 639-3, although their use is recommended by the Dublin Core guidelines (DublinCore 2020).

The questionable quality of the metadata is probably the most problematic aspect of the NCAA online repository. Indeed, many entries lack information on the identity of the original recordist(s), recording location(s), the cultural context of documented performance traditions, and the research context in which recordings were made. Moreover, it often remains unclear whether recording descriptions are based on the original recording documentation or if these were created during the digitisation process. There are no time-coded synopses of recording contents and descriptions are often insufficient regarding information content and grammar.Footnote ⁶

A greater focus on outreach and engagement could have contributed to amending these issues, as subject experts or community members could have certainly provided more information on the documented cultural practices, recording locations, and other recording details. While training programmes in audiovisual archiving took place during the project, which also entailed the introduction of an elective course in audiovisual archiving as part of a diploma course in cultural informatics (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, n.d.:6), neither the website nor the detailed project report indicate that any community outreach activities occurred, which could have helped to identify recording participants and obtain their consent before hosting recordings showing them and the traditional cultural practices of their communities on open access on the NCAA website. These shortcomings suggest that in practice, relevant memoranda on best ethical practices regarding the intellectual property protection of traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions were not adhered to during the project. This lack of due diligence regarding the ethical use of recordings can be attributed to the paternalistic attitudes towards ethnic minorities and the static, preservationist approach to cultural heritage which continue to prevail in contemporary India (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage 2024), where policy-makers insufficiently consider that archives are part of constantly changing cultural ecosystems (Schippers Reference Schippers, Pettan and Titon2015) and hence need to remain in touch with the communities whose cultural traditions they represent (Landau and Topp Fargion Reference Landau and Fargion2012). Overall, the NCAA archive thus leaves a very mixed impression, raising more questions than it answers about what might constitute “the cultural heritage of India”, as stated on the website, and what an online archive can do to represent in an unbiased way the diverse cultural expressions of the peoples inhabiting the country known by that name today. The main objective of the project, that is, to preserve in digital form what might otherwise be lost on analogue recording carriers, is laudable. However, the platform puts the spotlight on aspects of Indian culture that will already be familiar to most visitors of the website, while leaving the cultural traditions of religious and ethnic minorities ill-explained, opening doors to misrepresentations and misinterpretations of their cultural practices.