Archiving Gallantry and Curating Memory
The Gallantry Awards Portal as a State-led Digital Archive
Keywords:
Digital archives, Indian military history, Gallantry Awards Portal, State-sponsored archives, Archival silencesAbstract
In 2017, the Government of India launched an ambitious archival initiative to develop a digital military archive, to democratise military history by making it more accessible to the public. Drawing on policy directives, interface studies, and selected awardee profiles, this study probes how the Gallantry Awards Portal mediates between memory and documentation. This paper aims to understand and answer the following questions: how does a public portal reshape our interaction with military archives? And how do narrative structures, design elements, and metadata conventions shape historical meaning? Situating the portal within broader discourses pertaining to war commemoration, public history, and digital archival praxis, this article interprets the archive as an artefact by highlighting the significance of its silences and omissions. Furthermore, it seeks to understand the ongoing conversations about archival memory, sponsored by the state, along with its administrative apparatus that limits the stories being told.
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