Anant Jani is an third year undergraduate student at A

hmedabad University. His project during the internship period was about Interactive Correspondences. orrespondence offers insight into a person’s character and, in the case of Sir Pattani, into the diverse roles a person performs as a visionary administrator holding office during tumultuous times. How best to represent these letters and what they mean? As an experiment, I have used the interactive storytelling device of hypertext, using the software Twine, to create discrete repositories of information surrounding a single letter. Readers of the archive are given choices in the form of hyperlinks to navigate through contexts of their choice till they arrive at the exhibit. Depending on which branch they choose to follow, the readers construct a unique context that enriches the reading of the final exhibit. Readers can also choose to ignore the contexts and navigate the archives directly. 

Director-CEO, Ahmedabad World Heritage City Trust, Ahmedabad ,  he  is  working  for  the  management  and  conservation  of  UNESCO  World Heritage Site of Ahmedabad. The trust carries out  planning and designing,  training and capacity building, community awareness and other works to build a  bridge between people and policies. 

He started his career  from  IIT Roorkee after his degree in Architecture(B.Arch,  2002). Followed by Masters in Architectural Conservation (M.Arch, 2005). Since  2006, he has worked on a varied range of conservation projects with his partner  Poonam  Trambadia. With  World  Monument  Funds,  Archaeological  Survey  of  India,  TCGL,  Municipal  Corporation  of  Rajkot,  Govt.  of  AP,  Rajasthan,  Sarkhej  Roza committee, Rajkot Rajya Foundation, SEWA and others. 

A P Ashwin Kumar is Senior Fellow, at the Centre for Learning Futures, Ahmedabad University. He works in the field of philosophy of culture, with specific focus on concept discovery, and action knowledge. His book Nationalism, Language and Identity in India: Measures of Community has been published by Routledge. He is also an academic and literary translator working in English and Kannada. 

Avni Sethi is an interdisciplinary practitioner with her primary concern lying between culture, memory, space and the body. She studied Interdisciplinary Design from the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore and pursued a Masters in Performance Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi. She conceptualized and designed the Conflictorium. Trained in multiple dance idioms, her performances are largely inspired by syncretic faith traditions as well as sites of contested narratives. She is interested in exploring the relationship between intimate audiences and the performing body. 

Kalki Bhavsar is a final year B.Tech student at the Ahmedabad University with majors in Information and Communication Technology. Her area of work during the internship period was Website Development and Social Media content creation.

Dr.Lakshmi Subramanian, currently Visiting Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS,Pilani-Goa. Has had a long and distinguished teaching and research career, her research expertise includes maritime history, social and economic history of modern India and a social history of music in twentieth century India. Her publications include The Sovereign and the Pirate Ordering maritime subjects in India’s western littoral. (O.U.P. 2017) and From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy. A social history of music in south India (O.U.P, 2006). Her most recent publication is on Gandhi and the idea of Sonic nationalism. She has also curated an exhibition titled “The Scholar-Musician and the Seni ustads” based on a collection of private papers acquired by the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. The exhibition showcased among other things the potential that small private collections have in developing the emergent field of Public Humanities in India.

Nandini is a B.Tech student at the Ahmedabad University with majors in Computer Science and Engineering. Her area of research during the internship was digital dissemination of the archival collection. The digital collection is intended to provide online access to meaningful subsets of the archives, to promote awareness of the archival collection, and, primarily to bring these materials to the attention of historians, researchers and academicians. She has contributed to the project in two ways- one, creating a website and the other, creating content for social media. Through these contributions she realized how web based technologies have revolutionized the ways of historical research by providing a renewed approach to preserving archives. The internship provided a valuable experience in witnessing the immense scope of an interdisciplinary approach to history and technology. At the intersections of both lie exciting opportunities of new, unconventional learning methods. 

Nandini Oza, currently the President of Oral History Association of India (2020-22) is a researcher, writer, chronicler and archivist. She was an activist with the powerful people’s movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan for over a decade. Currently she is working on putting together a people’s oral history of the Narmada struggle which has been planned and carried out by her. These oral histories have been put out in the form of a website Oral History Narmada – Oral Histories of the Narmada Struggle, book and articles. Her books have been published in Marathi and English.  In 2017, she was awarded the prestigious writers’ residency at Sangam House, Bangalore. 

Nishitha Mandava is a third year B. A. student at the Ahmedabad University with majors in History. Her area of research was constructing enquiry through ports. A port report exchanged between an MIT graduate, an experienced navigator, and the Bhavnagar state’s Dewan in 1946 regarding developments required for the ports form the entry point into my enquiry that is concerned with the following question: Why did princely ports emerge as sites of contestations between the Bhavnagar State and the Government of India (GOI) during late 19th to mid-20thC?

This research culminated in the form of a digital booklet that closely examines the research question while weaving into it themes like sovereignty, geography and politics of indirect rule. Using these themes as a theoretical lens I trace the factors that moulded the discourse between the Bhavnagar State and GOI over princely ports. 

Dr.Seema Khanwalkar is a Professor, Adjunct Faculty at CEPT University, Ahmedabad. She completed her PhD in Linguistics from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in 1994 She is also a visiting Faculty at IIM Ahmedabad, and NID Ahmedabad. Her teaching spans 27 years across the Social Sciences and the Humanities. She teaches courses in Semiotics, Semantics and Design, Cultural Anthropology, Design Ethnography, Meaning and Design, Representation of Space, to students of Architecture, Design, and Management. She has guided several Master’s Thesis across institutions. She continues to consult to the Indian Industry,  for 25 years and provides counsel to branding and communication strategies. She straddles her academic and her industry inputs with equal passion. She has several international publications to her credit and is a regular presenter at the international Semiotic forums. She has been a Plenary Speaker at the International Semiotic Congress at Nanjing, and at Kaunas (Lithuania) and has also delivered the Institute Lecture at IIT Rourkee on Design thinking in 2017.   

Smit Shah is a third year Bachelor of Science (BS Honors) student at the Ahmedabad University. His area of research during the internship was History and Technology. An integrated, interdisciplinary approach to conservation and articulation of history is the  sustainable way forward, and it is precisely this thought that drew me towards the summer internship with the Pattani Archives. Technology based approach to history is the one that allows communities to access and participate in re-telling of histories, creating autonomous frameworks that are long-lasting and democratic. Historically done with manual aid such as typing machines, multi-level archiving practices have come a long way with the technology and internet revolution. 

Taarini Das is a third year B. A. (Hons) student at the Ahmedabad University with majors in Social and Political Sciences. Her area of research was archival interpretation through artworks.