This section states what the project is for, who decides what it holds, and on what terms material enters and leaves it. It is written to be argued with. Any principle here that cannot survive being read aloud to the people whose material it governs should be struck.
The principles were not designed in advance and then implemented. I drafted them in 2026, after the 2024 work in Ranchi had already raised the questions they answer, and some of them revise decisions already taken. They are a codification of working practice under repair, not a founding charter. Where a principle describes intent rather than operation, it says so.
Index and holdings
The project has two parts, and they are governed differently. The index is the public catalog on this page: descriptions of work its makers have already published, with links to where they host it. The holdings are field material gathered with filmmakers and interlocutors in Ranchi since 2024. The holdings are governed by the principles below, and none of them is published here yet. The index follows four narrower rules:
The index points to work where its makers host it. It does not download, re-host, or re-edit anyone else’s media.
Where a maker restricts access, the record says so and the restriction stands. Nothing is opened up by being indexed here.
Every record names its makers as they name themselves, and credits the collective or community before the platform.
Any maker or community can ask for a record to be corrected, reframed, or removed, and the request will be honoured.
The problem: saturation, not absence
Representation of Adivasi communities in Jharkhand has been organized by external framing: colonial ethnography, state administrative categories, and development reporting. The reduction to administrative form is not a distortion the record can correct by adding detail, because the categories are the instrument through which resources are released and populations managed.
The archival condition this produces is not absence. Critical archival studies names symbolic annihilation as the harm of being missing from the record. Adivasi representation runs the other way, toward saturation: over-documented by survey, census, welfare administration, and philanthropic reporting. The archive is too full of the wrong image. The remedy for absence is collection; the remedy for saturation is not more collection but control over description, circulation, and terms of appearance.
The region’s recent history adds three kinds of loss: material that left through circulation and was not returned, material lost to storage conditions and changes of medium, and material preserved abroad under descriptive standards devised elsewhere — a better outcome than loss, and not the same thing as custody. A fourth condition is the sharpest. Material about these communities is now easier to reach from another continent than from the districts it documents. Any principle that improves preservation without improving local reach has answered the smaller half of the problem.
Five principles
Each is stated with its mandate, the test by which a failure to meet it would be visible, and its sources. A principle without a failure condition is a slogan.
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Community control over terms of appearance
Decisions about what the archive collects, how items are described, who may see them, and how they may be reused rest with the communities and creators whose material it holds. Institutional partners may hold copies. They do not set terms.
Test of failure A decision about access, description, or reuse is taken without a named community decision-maker recorded against it.
Known limit CARE and OCAP were developed in settler-colonial jurisdictions and presuppose a community with recognized standing to assert governance rights. Jharkhand’s Adivasi communities hold Scheduled Tribe status under the Indian Constitution, a different instrument with different consequences. The principles are adopted here as working commitments, not as a claim that the legal ground transfers.
Sources Flinn, Stevens & Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives?”; the CARE Principles, especially Authority to Control; the First Nations Principles of OCAP.
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Collective authorship and appraisal
Authorship is recorded as it was exercised, which in this material is often collective. Where a work has a named maker the name is recorded; where it does not, the collective or community is the author, and no individual is substituted for convenience. Appraisal — the decision about what enters the archive at all — is a community function, not a facilitator function.
Test of failure An item enters the holdings on my judgment alone, or a controlled vocabulary is applied to an item without any community reviewer having seen it.
Known limit The current descriptive vocabulary is mine, and its analytical categories are the ones my research uses. Applying a closed vocabulary written by one person to material owned by many reproduces, at the level of description, the flattening this project was built to resist. The vocabulary is therefore held open: terms are proposals, any contributor may add to them, and no item is blocked for failing to fit an existing term. The contradiction is contained, not resolved.
Sources Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History”; the culture and communication practice of AKHRA.
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Recognition before audience
The primary audience is the community the material comes from. Design decisions that serve an outside scholarly or institutional audience at the expense of local legibility are decided against. Language, interface, bandwidth, and device assumptions follow local use rather than the reverse.
Test of failure Use is concentrated outside the state while local access remains untested, or the interface defaults to English where a community language is available. By this test, this page currently fails.
Sources Caswell, Cifor & Ramirez on representational belonging; Godoy, “Community-Driven Archives: Conocimiento, Healing, and Justice”.
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Circulation intent as a condition of entry
Every item carries a circulation decision made when it enters, not an access setting applied afterward. Open: anyone may reach it. Restricted: available locally and by named request, not published to the open web. Withheld: held under refusal and not listed publicly at all. Withheld is a legitimate and permanent destination, not a queue for later release. Where intent is unknown, the item is restricted.
Test of failure An item is published open with no recorded decision, or a withheld item appears in a public index, search result, or export.
What it does not claim The archive does not depend on any single commercial platform for the availability of its holdings, and offline distribution on physical media continues where connectivity requires it. Broader claims about platforms and Indigenous languages, made in an earlier draft, are withdrawn for lack of evidence.
Sources The losses described above; Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal” and Mohawk Interruptus.
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Oral and sonic material as primary record
Recorded speech, song, and language are catalogued as records in their own right, not as raw inputs awaiting transcription. Language and dialect are recorded for each item. It must be possible to describe an audio record without a transcript, since requiring one makes the record depend on labour the project cannot always fund.
Test of failure Audio items sit unlisted pending transcription, or a dialect is collapsed into a national language label.
Sources Feld, “Acoustemology”; Robinson, Hungry Listening.
Consent, attribution, and refusal
Consent is recorded per item and per person, not per project. A person who agreed to be filmed has not thereby agreed to be named, and a person who agreed to be named in a film has not thereby agreed to be quoted in a publication. These are separate fields because they are separate decisions.
Attribution in the holdings defaults to pseudonymous. An item appears under a real name only where naming consent has been recorded and checked against the field log. This inverts standard practice for a specific reason: several contributors work on land and mining questions in districts where being identified carries risk. For the same reason, the photographs on this page show rooms and equipment, not people.
Where a person’s role or identity is recorded inconsistently across sources, the item is held back until the field record resolves it; publication is not a way of settling who someone is. Consent may be withdrawn. Withdrawal removes the item from public display and from any export, and the archive keeps only a record that something was withdrawn. A right to enter that cannot be reversed is not a right to control.
Governance and the appraisal body
Community control is exercised by people making decisions on the record. Where no body exists to make them, control is exercised by whoever holds the login — at present, me. The proposed appraisal body is small and its remit narrow, because a structure more elaborate than the project can sustain fails quietly and leaves the same person deciding. Its functions, in order of priority:
- Appraisal: deciding what enters the archive and what does not.
- Vocabulary: approving, amending, and retiring descriptive terms, including the ones I have proposed.
- Access disputes: deciding contested tier assignments and hearing requests to reclassify.
- Withdrawal: acting on requests to remove material, without requiring a reason.
Until it exists, three interim rules apply, and they are recorded as interim:
- No item enters the holdings at the open tier without at least one contributor other than me agreeing.
- No new descriptive term is created without the same.
- My own research categories are marked as such, so a later reviewer can see which terms came from the community and which came from a dissertation.
Record model
Index records use a small schema aligned with Dublin Core, so the catalog can be exported to standard archival systems. The one deliberately local element is Through-line, the archive’s curatorial vocabulary.
| Field | What it records | Dublin Core |
|---|---|---|
| Identifier | Permanent record number, stable across revisions | dc:identifier |
| Title | The work’s own title, in its makers’ spelling | dc:title |
| Creator | Makers, collectives, or authors, as they name themselves | dc:creator |
| Date | Year of release, founding, or publication | dc:date |
| Type | Film, collective, platform, text, document, protocol, festival, library, audio | dc:type |
| Format | Medium and runtime or extent | dc:format |
| Language | Languages of the work | dc:language |
| Coverage | Place — district, state, region | dc:coverage |
| Through-line | The archive’s curatorial grouping | local vocabulary |
| Subjects | General subject terms | dc:subject |
| Description / note | What the work is, and why it is here | dc:description |
| Access | Open, by request, institutional, or published | dc:rights |
| Source | Where the work lives, at its makers’ address | dc:source |
Holdings records add the fields the principles require. Each field corresponds to a decision someone has to make, and exists so that the decision cannot be skipped.
| Field | Values | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | Village, block, district | Place at the level the community uses, not only the administrative one |
| Language / dialect | Open list | Dialect recorded, not collapsed into a national language |
| Subject term source | Community / contributor / facilitator research | Shows where each descriptive term came from |
| Information sheet; consent form held | Yes / no | “No” blocks publication |
| Attribution | Pseudonymous / named | Pseudonymous until naming consent is verified |
| Quotation consent | Required / waived | Whether separate approval is needed before quoting |
| Circulation tier | Open / restricted / withheld | Restricted where intent is unknown |
| Decision by | A named person | Who decided the tier; a blank is itself a finding |
| Withdrawn | Yes / no | Removes the item from display and export |
Sustainability
Community archives fail more often from exhaustion than from hostility. This project has no recurring budget, one part-time facilitator, and no institutional host that is not also a party with interests in the material. Four commitments follow, each modest enough to keep:
- Format discipline: holdings are kept in open, widely supported formats, so recovery does not depend on the platform the site runs on.
- Exportability: the catalog can be exported in full to a plain file at any time, and the export respects tiers.
- Redundancy without transfer of control: copies may be held elsewhere for preservation, but a preservation copy carries no right to describe, publish, or license.
- Reversion by default: any agreement with an institution is time-limited and reverts. A term with an end date is the most substantial protection a party with no drafting capacity can keep.
What this does not settle
Four things, recorded so that silence is not mistaken for resolution.
- The appraisal body does not exist. Until it does, community control is a commitment rather than a mechanism, and everything above that depends on collective decision depends on one person choosing to seek it.
- The descriptive vocabulary is mine. Marking each term with its source makes the problem visible; it does not solve it. A vocabulary becomes communal when a community amends it, and none has yet.
- Local reach is unimproved. This archive is easier to reach from outside Jharkhand than from inside it — the asymmetry it was built to answer, reproduced by the project itself. Naming it is not fixing it.
- Material licensed or accessioned elsewhere is governed by those agreements, not by this document, and nothing here overrides an agreement already signed.
Suggest a record, or ask for a change
If you make, hold, or know work that belongs here — or if you are a maker or community member who would like a record corrected, restricted, or removed — write to contact@arpitgaind.com. Removal does not require a reason.