ABSTRACT
This interview with C. S. Lakshmi is based on her experience of being the driving force behind the Sound and Pictures Archives on Women (SPARROW) from a feminist standpoint of intervening in the discourses of history through capturing the herstories of women and those around them in their everyday lives in and through the practice of archiving. The feminist ethos of the archives is clarified in relation to the archiving of women’s personal and political engagements through photographs, letters, oral histories, and autobiographies. However, Lakshmi speaks of how SPARROW is sensitive to the concerns of privacy and consent in making archived material digitally available only in a limited manner. She comments on the politics of archiving of women’s lives in relation to funding opportunities, ‘development’, as well as democratic practices of decision-making with regards to archives from the inside out.
