New Delhi: At the turn of the century, during the golden age of ‘90s Bollywood, an item number hit the charts: Nimbooda, from the 1999 film Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam.
And when archivist Shubha Chaudhuri spoke to the local Manganiar community in Rajasthan, from where the folk song Nimbooda originated, they told her that at least the film could have acknowledged it belonged to them. With a dance performed by Aishwarya Rai dressed in striking blue, the song immediately went down in millennium history. However, the community never made any money from it.
This very common issue of copyright and ethics is now being tackled head-on in the archives multiverse, where perseveration and documentation for posterity is the rule of thumb. Chaudhuri, Director of the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, pointed to this complicated conundrum when collecting and archiving folk songs. To whom does the song belong? Who has the right to profit from it? Does the archive own the records it has? And what ethical obligations does the archive owe both the creator and the user?
“Welcome to this very complicated area of ethics!” said Chaudhuri, addressing a group of archivists who had gathered on a Zoom call on a Friday evening during International Archives Week (3-9 June) to discuss exactly this.
The discussion over Nimbooda took up barely five minutes of the 90-minute-long session — just a taste of the kind of ethical questions that researchers, historians, journalists, and others face when documenting something. The real question was how to balance ethics, law, and intellectual property rights when it comes to archiving.
As the global legal framework around copyright law and community rights changed, archives began to struggle with issues like unclear legal guidelines and institutional policies. This meant that several objects might have slipped through the cracks and ended up in an archive without the proper permissions or credit due to the community or individual it came from.
Tuning in from London, California, and New Delhi, around 70 Indian archivists from across the world attended the session by Chaudhuri titled ‘Who’s right? Whose rights? Reflections on Ethics in the Archival Multiverse’, organised by the Milli Archives Collective. The session began with the launch of Milli’s guidebook, Archives, Ethics and the Law in India: A Guidebook for Archivists in India, put together over three years.
“Archives are uniquely situated. We are the ones in between the public, collector, community, and the user. We’re in a position to assign rights — when we take in and administer collections, we’re assigning ownership,” said Chaudhuri.
Public archives with public records — like government archives — have a clearer provenance. All government documents are supposed to be deposited in government archives after 30 years so that they are available for public access. But there are also private and corporate archives, for whom the legalities are slightly murkier.
“There is no archive without access. The moment you offer access is also the moment you open the doors to some kind of impact,” said Venkat Srinivasan, head of Archives at NCBS in Bengaluru. “You have to ask yourself who is being impacted — and then you ask, is that impact acceptable? And that’s where the ethics of society come into place, as well as the ways in which the law is trying to respond to these ethical questions.”
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Where do ethics come in?
Any researcher would attest to the joy of finding exactly what they were looking for in piles and piles of documents in an archive.
But in the digital age, as archives expand beyond documents and physical objects to repositories of photographs, songs, recordings, and other such objects, archivists have begun to think of how laws apply to the archives. From copyright laws to issues with digital reproduction, the question of whether an archive truly owns what it has — and in what capacities — has consistently come up.
To address this, the Milli Archives Collective — made up of individuals and communities passionate about nurturing archives in South Asia — released a guidebook on ethics to bridge the gap between law and ethics in archival practice.
“Law is a derivative of the morals of society in many ways,” said Srinivasan. “But those boundaries also change over a period of time, because access and the law respond to changes in the world — like new technology, changes in copyright law, and legislation like the Data Protection Act.”
The guidebook – and Chaudhuri’s session on ethics in the archival multiverse — looks at how ethics come in at almost every level of the archival process. This includes the acquisition of the archival object, which could be anything from letters to songs to photographs; the selection and prioritisation of the object, its preservation, cataloguing and metadata; who has access to the object; and finally, its dissemination. The question of who has access and who is allowed to disseminate the archival object, and in what form, is where the most challenges lie. Nimbooda is an example. A Bollywood film popularised the folk song and the producers profited from it without acknowledging the community it came from.
Chaudhuri explained how ethics became an important conversation within the archives in the late 1980s, as museums and archives across the West began to reevaluate their practices— especially when it came to folk and music archives—which were documenting and collecting fieldwork. As a result, collectors, depositors, and researchers became stakeholders in the archive and whatever it had in its collection.
“Thinking about ethics along with law, for instance, is important,” said archivist Farah Yameen during the session. “And to not just be legally correct but ethically correct while working with vulnerable communities is important too.”
The ethical way forward
Milli’s guidebook is an answer to the legal lacuna around the archives.
An archival object always starts in someone’s mind. Whether a diary entry or a digital recording, it begins with the creator and then goes to a custodian. It then travels from a donor to the archive and archivist, who then works to make it accessible to a user, who further uses it and disseminates it.
Things, however, get more complicated within the legal framework.
“A number of guidelines by professional societies, museums, etc, have really been on the increase in the last two decades — which means there’s been more need for archives to deal with ethics,” said Chaudhuri.
This includes the requirements for conducting the acquisition of records — whether as a gift, donation, purchase or through fieldwork. However, the activities of archives have almost no place in India’s legal framework, neither in preserving records nor in providing access.
The guidebook tries to provide a framework for archivists to apply to their archives, shining light on potential responsibilities and liabilities when it comes to giving access to records.
“I think that archives can and should — and with Milli, we’re doing our best — to do this ethically,” said Chaudhuri while wrapping up her session. “Advocacy for ethics, rights, responsibility and respect is something that all archives should be supporting.”
(Edited by Ratan Priya)