The Persistence of Memory: Building Archives of ‘Institutional Memory’ at Ambedkar University Delhi

Abstract

Institutions of higher education in post-independence India were developed as secular entities, with a tendency to become more socially inclusive, 1 providing for a distinctive kind of interaction between generations. The social milieu and gender, caste and class disparities do not disappear, but come to be questioned in such settings.2 While a university’s interests and identities are structured to encourage collective experiences and memories of inhabiting campus spaces, they also function as a site of knowledge transmission and cultural production, controlling the variant interpretations of the ways in which the institution’s past is perceived.