South Asian Movement Archive
History is the domain of the victors. And they wield their dominance and prominence at the cost of others. In South Asia, we have to contend with the deliberate erasure of narratives from communities at the margins, particularly those of women, queer individuals, indigenous peoples, minoritized and marginalized racial, caste and other subaltern groups. Both state-sanctioned and popular historiographies do not reflect their stories and presence in meaningful ways.
The South Asian Movement archive is committed to re-centering and documenting the voices that have been excluded time and again over many political and socio-cultural movements via audio, visual and textual materials. The archive’s aim is to foreground not only the presence, but the labor, leadership and epistemic contributions of marginalized communities in shaping the trajectories of resistance and dissent against authority and transforming the socio-political futures of South Asia.
The importance of archiving such movements lies in the critical role collective memory plays in shaping both present struggles and future possibilities. Social movements that arise in moments of political rupture are almost always retold in a reductive manner prioritizing normative and masculinist frameworks. In contrast, this archive seeks to preserve the polyphonic, affective, and embodied experiences of actors who do not conform to the prevailing norms but nonetheless are elemental to these movements, whose contributions cannot be swept away or ignored. We view archiving not merely as an act of preservation, but also as one resisting erasure and misrepresentation to destabilize unfair retellings.
The first chapter of this archive is on the July Uprising of 2024 in Bangladesh, a mass mobilization that erupted in response to killings of peaceful protesters in the face of increasingly autocratic state repression by the ousted Awami League. After more than a year, much of the discourse surrounding the uprising has tainted and warped the indispensable role played by women and queer individuals, whose labor and indomitable courage was instrumental in sustaining the momentum of the protests. From frontline protestors to community care givers to underground organizers, the uprising constituted a radical collective force against the state that would not have been possible without the action undertaken by marginalized groups of people.
The feminist solidarities forged across class, gender and geography during the uprising represent an important rupture in the political landscape of the region—one that demands rigorous documentation, critical reflection, and sustained engagement. Through multimedia archival practices, including bits from interviews, footage and images from the protests and various other collected material, this platform aspires to capture and amplify the plurality of resistance as it was lived, felt and performed.
South Asian Movement Archive hopes to contribute to a broader transnational conversation about the politics of resistance. It is a call to memory, and by extension, to action.
