Archiving: Corporate histories are gradually emerging out of dusty closets

At a time when a debate is raging over the trustworthiness of the electronic voting machines, a remnant of a bygone era catches the eye. It is a ballot box manufactured by Godrej for independent India’s first ever Lok Sabha election in 1951-52. Alongside, a faded newspaper clipping dated December 15, 1951 reveals that Godrej’s new factory at Vikhroli in Bombay is producing an average of 15,000 ballot boxes a day to meet the demand for the forthcoming elections.

The Godrej Archives at Vikhroli is a treasure trove of such trivia, which, when woven together, gives a glimpse into the history of the company — and of a country coming into its own. Spread across 3,000 sq ft, the facility houses a state-of-the-art repository, a conservation laboratory, a digitisation lab and an exhibition area. Inside are preserved over 140,000 items: some 81,000 documents, 50,000 photographs, 200 annual reports, 2,200 audio-visual pieces, 500 books, 1,500 catalogues and 330 records of oral history.

Not far from Mumbai, at the Tata Central Archives in Pune, more such historically significant treasures are painstakingly preserved. There is a permanent display of JRD Tata’s tools workshop and a to-scale replica of his Bombay House office.

A visit to the facility, located in a leafy neighbourhood on Mangaldas Road, is like embarking on a journey through time. One of the oldest among the nearly 500,000 documents that trace the story of the Tata Group is the 1875 annual report of Jamsetji Tata’s first venture — The Central India, Spinning, Weaving and Manufacturing Company. There is also a black-and-white picture of the first blast furnace at Tata Steel’s Jamshedpur plant, which heralded the growth of the Indian steel industry.

Far away in Kota (Rajasthan), another corporate archive — of DCM Shriram — tells the story of the evolution of India’s textile industry through artefacts. Likewise, the history and historiography of the country’s pharmaceutical industry is preserved at the Cipla Archives in Mumbai, complete with a decades’ old visitors’ album. It has Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel’s comments from when they visited Cipla’s first factory and R&D site in Mumbai Central on July 4, 1939.

India’s corporate history is slowly emerging out of dusty old closets.

The notion of business archives is still fairly new to India, with the Tata Central Archives, the oldest such institution opening up to public only 16 years ago in March 2001. But a change is now being scripted.

Businesses do not document their histories, thus losing memories of generations of workers, managers and owners, says Chinmay Tumbe, a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA), who has research interests in business and economic history. “We have over 10,000 companies in India with over 30 to 40 years of legacy, and yet the number of corporate archives is in single digits,” he says. One can count them on the fingertips: Godrej, Cipla, Dr Reddy’s, DCM Shriram and a handful others.

It’s a trickle when compared to the scale of corporate archives internationally, as the conference, “Back to the Future”, held recently at the Godrej campus in Mumbai revealed. The annual “Section on Business Archives” conference by the International Council on Archives discusses the role corporate archives play in reshaping brand identity and corporate culture.

“There were corporate archivists from the US, Europe, Japan and China, and from companies such as Barclays, Levi Strauss and Reebok. These companies really take archiving seriously,” says Deepthi Sasidharan, director of Eka Archiving,who has been helping teams from Tata Capital and other corporate houses set up their archives. Sasidharan was the chief archivist at the Tata Central Archives.

The conference, along with a one-day symposium at the Harvard Business School India Research Centre in Mumbai, has put the spotlight on the need for corporate archives. Newer archives are now on the anvil, one of those being Wipro’s. Bajaj, too, has come up with a heritage collection in Mumbai.

There’s a reason corporate archives are important. “How do you study about corporate history without a corporate archive?” asks Sasidharan. “If I want to research the history of paper mills, where do I go? How do I study about migration between cities? If you look at cities such as Bengaluru, Kochi, Hyderabad and Pune, they have been built on commerce. Corporate archives are important to understand these trends.”

Within companies, too, archives can bring a sense of pride and become a source of learning for employees, while also working as a branding tool. “It enables employees to understand the decision-making process. Who took tough calls and why in the past?” says Tumbe. “It is great for the academia as well. We typically write case studies based on events of the past five to 10 years. But some of the most interesting cases date back 50 to 100 years.” He cites the example of Ford versus General Motors. If one were to look back in history, one would be able to see the key strategies that helped GM take the lead over Ford.

Researchers at IIMA have delved into Indian history as well to write case histories of Indian businesses during the freedom struggle. Tumbe is currently helping set up the archives for IIMA. With over 14,000 of its alumni working in corporate India, this is important for the institution that has been an inextricable part of India’s business history.

Many unique ways of telling a company’s story have emerged. For Godrej, the idea of the archive took shape in 1997 when the group completed 100 years. Sohrab Godrej, then chairman, wanted to celebrate the group’s history. A committee was formed to collect artefacts, documents, photographs and so on. However, once the centenary celebrations were over, the collection was confined to a closet. That changed in February 2006, when the department of archives was formed.

The team, led by chief archivist Vrunda Pathare, started poring over material, manufacturing and technical drawings, testimonials, as well as sales and marketing records from across businesses. The processes for documentation and transfer of records were laid down. The old factory at Lalbaug, Mumbai, revealed a set of old circulars, issued from the 1940s to 1980s. “Many circulars helped us put a date to events,” she says.

But the most interesting stories emerged through oral testimonies, such as when the team stumbled upon the ballot boxes. “Through the testimonies, we discovered that the first plant that was set up in Vikhroli started with manufacturing ballot boxes,” says Pathare. “Pirojsha Godrej (founder of the Godrej Group) would visit the plant daily. Such was the enthusiasm and pride in the project that employees were willing to work three shifts.” One can hear audio recordings of these testimonies and read their transcripts at the archives.

Similarly, the Cipla Archives were conceptualised in 2014 when the generational change in leadership, new emerging business trends and the changing Indian and international pharmaceutical scenarios called for documentation of the company’s legacy.

“Should something not be done while all the people, who had overseen Cipla’s transformation from a backward rank in the 1950s to the top league in the 1990s, were still alive and in possession of clear memories of those years?” says Usha Iyer, Cipla’s chief archivist. The work on the archives started in 2015 and has led to 12 collections: oral history, media, photographs, documents, journals, sales literature, 3D objects, research and development, audiovisual, special media, books and soft copy (born-digital material). This sizeable collection is housed in a temperature-controlled and CCTV-secured repository. The archive is a no-food-and-drink zone, where no outside footwear is allowed. It follows strict supervised cleaning schedules. The items are stored on customised shelves in large compactors or optimisers and racks. There is also a dedicated research area for visitors.

Individual items in the collection have often taken Iyer and her team by surprise. “One of my favourite items is from our ‘Media’ collection. It’s an early Cipla ad placed in the 1948 edition of the journal, Marg, which was edited by Mulk Raj Anand,” she says. Seen in the post-Independence context, there is nationalist fervour in the wording, with a call to use Indian medicines without an inferiority complex. “The emphasis and pride on world-class quality, even in those early days, are aspects that have captivated me as an archivist,” Iyer says.

While a museum space or viewing gallery is on the anvil, “for the moment, digital options to make our stories and collections available to the world permanently appear to be preferable,” says Iyer.

Digital seems to be the way forward for Tata Capital as well. The augmented reality/virtual reality digital archive was launched in September 2017 to mark the 10th annual day celebrations. On both platforms, the repository has been split into four categories: milestones, awards and accolades, brand’s journey and CSR initiatives. A 3D simulation takes the viewer to four floors in a building, modelled around One Forbes, Tata Capital’s registered office, with each floor dedicated to a category.

Some organisations, such as Taj Hotels Palaces Resorts Safaris, have not confined their archives to a specific facility but have created specially curated corridors. Here, visual chronicles from the hotel’s 114-year-old history have been displayed. For instance, the corridor at one of the Taj Mahal Palace hotels features images of Sarojini Naidu and Lord Mountbatten, among others. There are innovatively designed spaces, too, which display photographs of famous guests such as George Harrison, Prince Charles and Barack Obama. While revisiting the archives this year, the team found the original menu that was served to guests on the night of August 14, 1947, the eve of Independence.

It’s fascinating to see how one archive feeds into the other. For instance, while researching for the IIMA archives, Tumbe stumbled upon a series of testimonies at the Godrej archive pertaining to the institution. “Godrej was one the first recruiters at IIMA,” he says. “At that time, the idea of management education was fairly new. The archive has testimonies of both the recruiter and the first recruit.” Through the testimonies, Tumbe learnt how difficult it was to convince people within the firm about the value of MBA graduates, and then the quick reception to the idea once the new recruits proved their mettle.

Though the intention of the corporate archive is to celebrate the company’s journey, care is taken to not romanticise the past or misrepresent events of the bygone era. “We don’t conduct hagiographic questioning, with relation to the promoters or the top management,” says Cipla’s Iyer. Contrarian viewpoints, admission of mistakes, unpleasant episodes or decisions that didn’t deliver expected results are also represented. For instance, there are descriptions of industrial problems between the 1970s and the 1990s, and of the bold experiments with management styles in the early 1990s.

The idea is also to make the archives relevant, and not just a collection of nostalgia, memories and artefacts. Any archivist, says Iyer, who looks at archives merely as a window into the past is choosing to adopt a narrow view of their work.

Photos: Courtesy Godrej Archive and Chirodeep Chaudhuri