Prajnya Archives is a community-driven digital archive dedicated to building and preserving a cultural repository of memories and voices of women in South Asia, which can be used for writing much needed histories of South Asian women. As a grassroots, record-keeping initiative, we invite the public to contribute stories, photographs, documents and other digitisable material that tell us about women you know, and whose life (public and/or private) and work you believe should be known to others. We encourage you to also tell the archive about yourselves.
The Prajnya Archives regularly puts out a call with themes, inviting photographs and stories that support these themes. In the past, we have published calls for the Rainmakers photo project, The First Graduate exhibit , the Citizen Next Door exhibit and an ongoing call for a Healthcare Heroes exhibit. Visit Exhibits to see what we have collected so far around these themes.
Prominent women’s activist Vibhuti Patel’s generous submissions to the Archives have made it possible to create a separate exhibit on the Indian Women’s Movement and Patel’s central role in it. This is an ongoing project.
We have a Life Stories Archive that is an ongoing project, which will not be publicly available online but can be used by researchers (contact us for more information).
Another archive in the making is that of the institutional history of The Prajnya Trust, under whose umbrella the Archives began its work in 2010. The Prajnya Resource Centre and Trust have closed but the archives will continue as part of the work of Chaitanya Consultancy.