This archive is a lightweight platform to enable access, download and inter-mediation among several collections, collectors, scholars, and media practitioners. Over the past six decades, the programmes and projects of CSDS have accumulated a mammoth database in legacy formats of paper, audio, and video. Building on this wealth of resources, this dynamic webspace will add high-resolution digitised books, reports, journals, magazines, pamphlets, documents and audio-visual materials that have remained largely invisible to the public eye. So, it is a curated people’s archive spanning several languages and forms. It builds on the generous donations of books and journals made by several ex-faculty members, scholars and collectors and, most importantly, vendors who deal in recycled ‘raddi’ (scrap) infrastructure. One can browse these sources across the colonial/post-colonial divide of history for news, views, features and analysis of a range of subjects. Since it started with a certain inter-media emphasis and obsession, the material related to cinema, radio, film journalism and film ephemera constitutes its core, but it is bound to expand in multiple directions.

Enabled by funding from ICAS:MP, the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, and UCLA’s Modern Endangered Archive Programme, it privileges rescuing endangered material and uses archive.org as its backend. (Click for Details)