A panegyric to paper

Charles Dickens invented, in Little Dorrit , the archetypal bureaucratic office, an intricately constructed maze of red tape marshalled by obfuscating clerks. Indians recognise in Dickens’ Circumlocution Office a contemporary portrait of our own mouldering government departments and the pedantic, magisterially incompetent civil servants harboured within, consulting their files, their leaning towers of files. Few of us, perhaps, are inclined to look upon files and paper with much affection, stung by those requests for forms in triplicate.

Counterintuitively, Dayanita Singh’s File Room , her 11th and most recent book, is a panegyric to paper, to the dusty, roach-laden archives to which our histories are consigned, held precariously in abeyance until someone asks and the long-forgotten is temporarily revived. The book, another collaboration with her German publisher Steidl, is typically elegant. Black-and-white gives Singh’s photographs of rotting rooms and rotting paper an austere quality. There is something noble about the Sisyphean effort to maintain these archives in tropical weather, with little budget to speak of, in the face of worms, rats, bats, even industrial-strength fans; something noble about the men and women who do this thankless job of being locked in hour after hour, day after day with the dust and the smell of decomposing paper seeping slowly into their lungs.

But for all the death and decay evident in these photographs, File Room is not just, as Singh’s own website describes her book, an elegy. Yes, paper will soon, even in these fusty archives, be replaced by digitised files but what cannot be lost is the human spirit of which these files are a moving symbol. People want to leave behind something of who they were and how they lived. As Singh says to the Swiss art historian and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, in a long interview included in the book, just “one fact and one file could make such a difference to someone’s life.” She then tells a story about going to the “land record department, which looked a mess and I thought it would be impossible to find anything there. They said, ‘Tell us your father and grandfather’s addresses’... From this they told me that my great-great-grandfather had been adopted by such-and-such a Hindu family, so I’m not quite the lineage that I thought I was, and I said, ‘Stop it, I don’t want to know anything more!’”

Archives, Singh is saying, are as much about life as they are about death; inside those files are clues to who we are, how we got here, who we used to be. File Room should be read in conjunction with The Archivist , a collection of photographs by Nony Singh (Dayanita’s mother) released as a book towards the end of last year. The bulk of the pictures are of Nony Singh’s family — parents, siblings, husband and children. A picture of one of her sisters posing as Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind in 1962, for instance, is juxtaposed with a picture of the same sister in Delhi in 2013, the original photograph of her younger self on the wall behind her. Time has passed between the two photographs, been lost as such never to be recovered, but in the look the old woman gives the camera the young woman from half a century ago is still present. Our faces are palimpsests, traces of the past still evident beneath the lines and sagging skin of the present.

Memory is the spur for Nony Singh the photographer, her desire not only to record particular moments for posterity, but to shape memory, bring order to it. The archivists in Dayanita Singh’s File Room pictures do something similar, each organising and shaping the memory vault with which they’ve been entrusted in idiosyncratic, resolutely individual ways. Memory, of course, is how we keep things alive. These files then, ordered so apparently haphazardly, are teeming with life, with memory. That they are teeming with life quite literally, as Aveek Sen points out in an essay published in File Room , is surely not incidental.

Pictures from File Room show up in The Archivist , in the background. More directly, the last pictures in The Archivist are pictures of the files under Nony Singh’s dining table, at the foot of her bed. These are files from the umpteen lawsuits she has fought since she was widowed, lawsuits to do with wheat production and land ownership.

A version of an essay in The Archivist , titled ‘Sea of Files’, is reproduced in File Room , an insight into how Nony Singh’s life became consumed by the documents needed to pursue cases in court. Within those documents, though, was an image of her husband she was fighting to preserve. It is the same passion with which she seeks to preserve her husband’s dog-eared photographs of his many girlfriends before he met Nony; here, in these dry legal documents and photos of a dapper man dancing with blondes, is her husband. Not that paper should be confused with life itself, which is why Nony gives up on her lawsuits before it consumes her life completely and that of her children.

Dayanita Singh does not fetishise paper in File Room . She is aware of its limitations. What she is celebrating is its tactility, its odours, its perishability. The vulnerability of paper, a little like that of humans, feels somehow appropriate as a medium on which to record human action and memory. There is poetry in these fetid storerooms with their delicately poised heaps of paper and Singh — who with her recent retrospective at The Hayward and her inventive ‘Museum Bhavan’, mobile collections of her voluminous work, is an artist at the height of her career — records that poetry ironically for posterity. As for digital files, surely nothing could be more prosaic.

Shougat Dasgupta is a freelance journalist based in Delhi

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