There is a kind of silence that stays with you.
Working in an archive, you notice that silence lingers not in the absence of sound, but in the absence of presence. When a name doesn’t appear in an index, when a page is torn, perhaps blackened out with ink, when the file that should be there isn’t.
Or worse: when it is there, but says nothing. Empty.
I’ve spent the last few years in archives all over the world. Police records, colonial correspondences, surveillance files, papers and papers and manuscripts written in illegible handwriting…
Names and names
And the same name again
And again
Then, gone.
Another phrase: Suspect X
Ex-Detenue
Notorious
Was the archive built to preserve names?
Names of whom? You see, many colonial archives were built as intelligence, not for the memory of posterity but rather to tackle immediate ‘problems’.
When I was younger and a lot less experienced with these archives, I’d often mistake repetition for importance, loudness for meaning. I remember sitting in the reading room of the West Bengal State Archive in Kolkata, running my fingers through the brittle pages that once passed through the hands of colonial officers. It was hard to come across documents – letters, notes, accounts that were written by the women I am researching. But there were some documents about them.
There were intercepted personal letters that perhaps a young woman wrote to her dear friend – Please help me decide what to do, you know my soul. Am I ready for this, didi?
These documents were scored, stamped and annotated by intelligence officers. I found something disorienting in that: reading private letters addressed to sisters, friends, mothers. Letters that never reached their destination. They remained there in the archive gathering what Carolyn Steedman called dust, passing through hands, read by so many people, and scored, and marked, and breached a thousand times.
Looking at these documents, and the fragments through which women’s lives appear, I think about who gets remembered and how. I think about how dangerously close erasure is to forgetting. And I wonder what it must look like to write history from these gaps; not trying to fill them in, but understanding them and containing them.
Silence is not the same as absence. Silence comes in layers, silence is deliberate. Silence protects just as it releases.
In marking these silences and gaps, I do not wish to mourn the loss, nor do I want to romanticise them. I also don’t want to pretend to overcome it with books and theorising.
But I can sit with it. I can write about it just as I am doing now.
And, I can ask questions: Why isn’t this here?
And maybe that’s where the work begins.
Malya b 
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