It is always a little challenging to rationalize the archival peril in recovering the domestic scene of a late Thursday lunch- tiger prawns cooked in coconut milk, bowlfuls of steamed rice and a detectable raw mango pudding sourced from a generous neighbor- to, in other words, fall back on the generative function of a memory-system grafted on shifting home-city geographies to narrativize and subsequently revoke what I suppose is a spatial amnesia about the sense of being 'at-home.' The affordances offered by these long-disbanded homescapes open up a rogue space of archivisation- of objects rarely behaving appropriately in the operational space of the archive, evading arbitrary categorizations, slipping ever-so-often into a lover's songbook, into the last verse of the predawn azaan wafting across the empty fairground. Occasioning the turbulent rupture of self-history and self-mythology. Self-reference, even.
Not unlike its truant dweller, my 'provisional' homeland is a fugitive archive. Any attempt to "fix" time must negotiate with this nomadic condition, with what it is like to live in the plural- in-between languages, temporalities, intersections, and interactions. My rather obsessive preoccupation with shifting, sonic geographies, sound maps, and Sufi theology and praxis has recently led me to spend hours listening to archival recordings of faqirs from Sri Lanka, in an attempt to reconstruct, through the spatial qualities inherent to the sound archive, an experiential engagement with the Sufi dargah, as it once existed. While the efficacy of such archive retrieval in terms of scholarly contribution is of course unwarranted, sonic moments like these, I believe, have that phantasmatic quality of an imaginative-hallucinatory disorientation, sometimes therapeutic, sometimes effectively de-mystifying the external, the textual. Yet it religiously evades cartography- shifting across sociolinguistic terrains- Urdu, Tamil, Hindavi, the Delhi Sultanate, Dafter Jailani-across geographies of reverence and demolition.
It is difficult to rectify the precarious instability of my archival space.
Say, a German translation of Attar's "The Conference of Birds," or my first Urdu assignment- 'write a letter to a friend describing your favourite song'--
--can the archive restore me?
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