Why companies in India need to invest in building their archives

We speak to Sanghamitra Chatterjee, an archivist and heritage management consultant, who is passionate about documenting stories about India’s families and corporate past

What does a college graduate in history actually do with two degrees that deal with the past? It’s a question that Sanghamitra Chatterjee asked herself after graduating as a history major. Armed with a Bachelor’s degree in history from Mumbai’s Ramnarain Ruia College and a Master’s degree from Mumbai University, Chatterjee was determined to find her calling in building repositories of archival value. Her professional journey as an archivist began with the setting up of the Godrej Archives, where she worked on researching the 125-year-old brand’s products, plants and people. In 2016, Chatterjee–realising the enormous potential of the archival world–decided to set up Past Perfect, a heritage management company. Edited excerpts from an interview with Chatterjee highlight the wealth of untapped information that lies in India’s vast entrepreneurial networks and families. 

Why did you start a heritage management company? 

The options that you typically have, after you complete a degree in history, are either get into full fledged research towards a PhD, or pursue teaching, or take the UPSC exams. In 2004, I began working on an internship with the Godrej Archives with the idea that I would do it for three months or so. But it went on to become a ten-year-long stint. [At the Godrej Archives] I worked on maintaining the collection, cataloguing the collection, expanding it, and then using the collection in various ways to communicate the story, having exhibitions and various other engagement activities. 

By 2016, I sensed that archiving and historical documentation was suddenly becoming very cool. There are no institutes in India that train you to handle private records. There is the National Archives of India, but it is concerned  largely with government records, which is very different from private records. 

This was the beginning of considering it as an actual viable career option. 

More importantly, I think we were at a very interesting juncture–there were a whole lot of third-generation and fourth-generation business houses that were becoming conscious of their legacy. So it felt that it was the right time to broaden the scope of archiving, especially in business archiving. 

Did you think there was a business model in archiving?

I was very conscious and clear about the fact that I'm not going to do this as a freelancer. What I wanted to do is set up a company because as a freelancer, the job is so demanding that there is only this much you can do. While studying for my Master’s, it was a huge struggle because there were no jobs around at all. So most [students] give up history or social sciences because there are no jobs in related fields. So I was very focused that this has to be done as a business, it has to be a company. It has to have a group of foot soldiers who can get the work done.

Past Perfect had to do that. The other thing that we were very clear about right from the beginning–because I do not have an academic background–is that we have to make history fun and cool, since we're working with institutions, understanding their own history. We use research methodology while documenting in a very academic sense, but the ultimate communication is different. So these were essentially the two things that I had in mind when we set up Past Perfect. I started the company with a colleague, Deepti Anand, who I had worked with earlier and she’s the co-founder of the company. 

Did you start off with targeting corporate India? 

Initially when I began, it was with the aim of archiving corporate India’s history and the family business. But as it turned out, our first project was for the Willingdon Sports Club, which was not a hardcore archiving job, it was more of a research job, to get their collection catalogued. We were also involved in the book that was being written for their centenary year. 

I realised that more than archiving, most institutions and corporations needed internal expertise to help them sort through what is there, as it can be too overwhelming for them to do this on their own. And what they basically want at the first stage is just document that material and have a system in place so that we can then figure out a way of communicating this material. 

In our first year itself, we got requests from various people through word of mouth. There were families who wanted to [trace their histories]. We also broke into the film industry in the very first year itself, not because we were seeking it but it just so happened that we knew someone who was working on a period drama who reached out to us asking whether they knew any researchers. We put together a team and from there on, we have three different verticals: corporates and institutions, family histories, and the work we do with the media and film industry. 

What has been the big challenge in establishing a company like this?

Finding trained archivists, for one. But we've figured out a way to work around this–we just teach them just like I learned on the job. The National Archives of India does conduct courses, but it's largely suited to government records.Private records are a completely different ballgame. You have to be sensitive to the history of the family that you're working with. If things are supposed to be confidential, you have to leave it confidential. There is no public policy, mandating us that in 30 or 50 years, this has to be made open.  What  can be made available or not is to be negotiated with the corporation.  

As  a company, we're very curious by nature, which is why we will work on a period drama based in Lahore, we will work with a company that manufactures car batteries, and we will get into making a hero out of a grandfather, all in the same day. For us, it kind of feeds into our curiosity. We are constantly asking–how did this happen? 

So you build stories for your clients? 

Essentially, yes, because you can't just collect the past and make it sit. It has to have the potential to be relevant for the present and future generations. It's just that you have to be a little creative in the way you're seeing it. 

Along the way, we figured out what it is that corporations and institutions really want–that is, which kind of corporate institution would actually go the whole distance and set up an archive, and which institution is doing this because, you know, they want just the story documented. 

Archiving takes time–it's a huge commitment of time, money and effort. So corporations firstly need to see that there is an audience and there is benefit in doing this, and only then will they set up an archive. It's very important for us to understand where they are, what is it that they want to do? And that's when we structure something out for [clients]. There are many companies who want to archive their past. It's been 75 years since the country’s independence so companies who are completing milestones want to do something about it. 

Working with families [on their life stories and personal histories] sometimes also means that budgets are a constraint. But it is also a completely different kind of storytelling –it’s encouraging and very gratifying. 

Other than the National Archives of India, what other resources do you think are invaluable?

My favourite is the Asiatic Society Library in Mumbai. They have a very good and accessible collection, and are also digitising their collection. Additionally, there are so many smaller connections, and with every project, with every industry or company that I work with, we realise there are trade associations and organisations that exist or existed. They have so much within them but don't have the wherewithal to get into an archive and make their material accessible. 

For instance, in the case of the archives of the Bajaj group, we identified a lot of material from the Indian Merchants’ Chamber. They don't have an archive as such, but they have an office that has maintained records. The Bombay Stock Exchange has a library, and if you write to them, they give you permission to access it. The Indian Institute of Architects has been publishing a journal from the 1930s which has been very useful to our work. 

Tell us about your ongoing projects?

Currently, one of our biggest projects is the Bajaj archive, which has a 100-year history. It's a proper institutional archive, which means there's a temperature-controlled, humidity-controlled repository that has been created, along with cataloguing and an expanding collection. So you're constantly reaching out to people to see what they have and are  growing the collection. We're not deep-diving into the businesses as yet–it's more around the family for now, simply because the family has a very dynamic history. We’ve traced it from four generations ago, since their history of being involved with the freedom struggle. A lot of the businesses that they set up in the 1960s is what the family is known for today. The research that is now getting converted into a digital campaign that can benefit the brand, what I call essentially ‘heritage- led marketing’. It's how you can put your legacy to work. 

Another project we started this year is very interesting, simply because it's taken me to a completely different industry: The computer and IT industry, the hardware and the software part of it, with HCL. We've recently also completed a documentation for Seva Sadan. We do take up smaller projects that are not solely for the money. 

We’ve recently completed two family-history projects. One is for a grandfather celebrating a milestone birthday, a project based  entirely on oral histories. We sat with the gentleman for hours, talking about his life, spoke with the rest of his family and friends and put it all together. 

Another extremely ambitious, exciting project we’ve been working on for four years is for a client with roots in Hyderabad, New Delhi and Rajasthan–we've traced them back to 1857. It will be written in the style of a Jeffrey Archer potboiler, complete with fictionalised details and a narrative that is ‘based on the truth’. Sometimes family histories don't lend to cliffhanger moments but you still have to figure out a way to tell the story engagingly. 

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