Documents, Digitisation and History.

Recent years have seen a very large rise in digitisation projects in various state-administered archives in India, including the National Archives of India and regional archives in different parts of the country. This essay argues that rather than increasing access and transparency, digitisation serves to reproduce and potentially even increase state control over historical sources and memory. In addition, the elision of context in digitised collections in state archives poses problems for historical research, particularly for scholars from less privileged institutions. It is imperative that these efforts go beyond an understanding of digitisation as conservation alone in order to harness the creative and pedagogical possibilities offered by digital technology to influence, and even transform, the historical scholarship of a wide variety of users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]