Parvati’s Diary: The Afterlife of a Text

In the early 2000s, my grandmother’s sister - my grand aunt - gave me a diary - a blue covered book. It was her mother’s diary. My grandaunt knew her mother only fleetingly, as she had passed when my grandaunt was barely 3 and my grandmother 9.

Parvati Pant’s diary is about 200 closely written pages, written between November and December 1921 with a few loose pages kept in it from March 1922. It is in pristine condition and the pages look fresh and the ink has not blurred. She writes this diary while she was living in West Kensington in London, and as she travels across the continent with her husband, Trimbakrao. She observes mostly the mundane, 
and sees similarities rather than differences.

In this presentation I ask: How might one locate a hundred year old diary - which is both an artefact and a source, for want of another word, data? How does one represent and contextualise Parvati, an Indian woman writing about Europe in terms that are domestic, mundane, touristy and yet uniquely her own even as she rarely contextualises herself? How do I represent Parvati, not just any woman looking at the West, but specifically, my great grandmother? What is the form of biography that this diary can be contextualised as? And finally, a question to which I have no answer - What are the forms of writing or exhibiting that might illuminate this text? 

This event is jointly organized by the South-Asia Institute and the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies.