Everyday stories: The people’s archive and the rural in ‘new’ India

Abstract

This article is a case study of the People’s Archive of Rural India, a multimedia digital archive founded by journalist P. Sainath, which debuted online in December 2014. PARI features photographs, videos, interviews, audio files and articles that seek to illuminate the lives of the over 833 million people who live in rural India. Focusing on the narrative form of the ‘story’ and the universalizing temporality of the ‘everyday’, the article asks, ‘What is the relationship between PARI’s rural India and the “New” India to which it ostensibly belongs? How do PARI’s textual and visual mediations work together to produce the rural as a region?’. The article explores the relevance of postcolonial theory for the study of cultural production in the time of ‘New’ India, while arguing that PARI offers a Janus-faced depiction of the rural as urban India’s historically entrenched Other, on the one hand, and as a critical outside to the neo-liberal imagination, on the other.