Date with The Archive | The Feminist in the Archive | A Talk by Urvashi Butalia | December 04, 2025
How do you search for an absence?
Join us to listen to Urvashi Butalia reflecting upon the multiple ways in which she has engaged—as a researcher, activist, publisher, teacher and writer—with archives, and especially with its absences.
It starts with questions. As a teacher of multiple histories of feminism, Urvashi is constantly confronted with the question of how to look for something that is basically an absence: what tools and methodologies do you bring to the search, and what sense do you make of the fragments you recover? As a publisher, she has spent over four decades seeking out women's voices to bring to public attention. Together, these form a formidable archive that tells us that these absences and silences of the past were not because women did not write, and thus, push us to ask different questions.
But this archive remains limited. She asks: how do we ensure it does not disappear in the future? How do we look at the question of access? How do we make certain that these voices are not only those of upper castes and upper classes, and that they are heard? As an activist, Urvashi will speak about how to bring feminist, egalitarian practices to our archives, and how one handles the questions of responsibility, custody, ownership, and sustainability that must undergird the work. And as a writer, she deliberates on the question of how to write a life, a marginal life, in which there is no archive other than the person themselves.
The Feminist in the Archive with Urvashi Butalia
December 04, 2025 | 06:30 PM IST
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Urvashi Butalia is a feminist publisher and writer. Co-founder of India's first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women, she now heads Zubaan, set up when Kali shut down in 2003. She has many decades of involvement in the women's movement in India, and writes and publishes widely on issues related to women and gender. Among her best known publications is the award winning oral history of Partition, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India.
Image Courtesy: Poster Women Archive
Launched in 2018, The IFA Archive is a space that holds the diverse materials of the projects supported and implemented by IFA over the years, currently featuring materials from over 500 projects online at theifaarchive.org
Date with The Archive is a series of talks by artists and researchers across different practices who have used archives extensively for their creative work, to bring to focus the potential of the archive as a significant resource for artistic and scholarly explorations.
The IFA Archive is built with support from SP Lohia Foundation India.