Historian, Durba Ghosh, began her research in the British and Indian archives, taking interest in the intimate relationships between British men and Indian women during the early British colonial period in India. In the India Office Library in Calcutta, Ghosh came into conflict with archivists who harbored incompatible viewpoints about the suitability of her topic, and who ultimately had the power to provide her with materials for her project. After her frustrating encounters with the Indian archives, she concluded, “While I was busy reading the archives, I found the archives were busy reading me.” Ghosh’s expectations of the project changed significantly when she realized that the archivists themselves altered the outcome of her project. Ghosh, concerned with the relationship between the local Indian women who cohabitated with European men in the eighteenth century as a result of British rule in India, set out to dissect this relationship and whether it was “carefree and consensual” for the native women. This subject, however, clashed with the India Office Library archivists’ interests. Ghosh discovered that the archive will only divulge what a historian is allowed to see and the archivist is the one who judges what the historian can see. While work in the archives are the building blocks to history, their limitations can also bring the historian to a crashing halt. Archives are powerful tools and shape not only the narrative, but also the historian.  

David Brandenberger and Manuella Meyer, historians of Soviet Russia and Latin America respectively, support Ghosh’s claim with their own archival experiences. Recently, Brandenberger and Meyer visited out “Historian’s Workshop” seminar at the University of Richmond to talk about their experiences in the archives and about their research. While both had prepared a well-structured plan for their archival research, they needed to accept adjustments and changes once they began their research. They had to draw up new tactics in order to accomplish their goals, as differences in acceptable topics and views became a point of contention between themselves and the archivists with who they worked. Historians must learn to adjust by finding what Brandenberger identifies as “diagonals,” as a way in which specific pieces of evidence can be found and accessed through different context. This technique yields more evidence for the researcher because the historian has put a new context on the content he or she is looking for. What was previously unavailable to the researcher can be accessed with slight changes of language. For example, Brandenberger is interested in researching nationalist groups, but Russian archivists told him that nothing was available for him on that topic. Brandenberger reorganized, went back to the archivist and asked if they had anything on “patriotism.” Instantly, an abundance of content became available for him to continue with his research. Meyer was interested in a group of indigenous people and was refused information by the terms she was using to locate materials. She discovered that certain words had attached racial euphemisms which made material to find. Both discovered that research in foreign archivescan create conflicts when nationality, gender, race, and language are viewed differently. What one might consider a valid topic worth the research, another would frown upon the idea as a result of negative connotations associated with a topic as a result of differing values and cultures.

The archivist judges what evidence is passed along to the historian while the historian cares most about the content and context of the evidence within the documents. Archivists’ views on the legitimacy of topics and the legitimacy of historians can influence what the historian is shown in the archive, particularly when conducting researching in a foreign archive. The historian’s identity plays a significant role in whether or not the archivist presents particular evidence. The archivist has the opportunity to keep documents from the historian as the archivist is not required to show the historian anything that they do not want to. Ghosh, Brandenberger, and Meyer found that they needed to reorganize their work in order to receive documents in which they were interested. Judgments by the archivist ultimately decide what the historian is allowed to see, therefore, affecting the evidence that passes through the historian’s hands and the resulting narrative. The historian only gains access from what the archivist wishes to show them, as the archivists have the ability to maintain a narrative that the historian is forced to follow.