Sindhi Halchal Archive: Building on the PG Sindhi Library

In my previous post, I wrote about potentialities: I spoke about what might be doable for the Sindhi presence within the digital archiving scene in terms of annotation, transliteration, and curation. While those original visions faced practical constraints, such as technical resource limitations, they resulted in a more distributed approach: creating multiple interconnected projects that address different aspects of Sindhi literary preservation and access. 

In this series, I follow up with projects that have emerged from this work and touch upon some of these aspirations. I begin with the Sindhi Halchal Archive, which went live in March 2025. 

Sindhi Halchal Archive

The Sindhi Halchal Archive is dedicated to the advertisements published in Sindhi books and magazines in India by writers and small scale publishers producing books after 1947. In the absence of state support or major infrastructure to reach wider audiences all over the country – Sindhis are scattered in different cities in India – it is these small scale publishers that tried hard to keep the Sindhi literary area active. The publishers and writers were supported by Sindhi entrepreneurs who purchased advertising space offered in their publications. Their contributions kept the books coming: it covered the printing and distribution costs. They thus supported the writers, the cause of the language, and most importantly, kept the reading activity alive. 

These advertisements throw light on post-Partition Sindhi histories of books, print industry and publishing, entrepreneurial activity, and Partition history and literature in general by showing how books become sites of violence and displacement. The archive has already been exhibited at The Museum of Cartoon Art in Pune and at Bangalore International Centre in Bengaluru. It’s a digital archive that aspires to travel among community spaces for fellow archivists, scholars, and Sindhis. 

Methodology

The process of putting the archive together started with collecting screenshots of advertisements from digitised books in the PG Sindhi Library. Each advertisement was processed through Image to Text, an existing text extraction software, to collect the contents of the advertisements. Having all the text extracted and uploaded to the archive made it easier to enhance the search capabilities beyond what traditional metadata field population would have allowed for.

Once the text extraction was done, individual entries for the advertisements were created with the name of the enterprise, its type, its location, its source/book, the details of that source, and a link to the image file. This systematic approach resulted in the entries for over 2,000 advertisements spread across 65 books being compiled into a structured CSV format. The process of database compilation has been supported by computer science students at SRM University-AP and a former research scholar, some have contributed out of goodwill and others as a part of their project based learning for credits. 

Technology

Sindhi Halchal Archive is built on Frappe, a full-stack, low-code foundation web framework useful for database-driven websites. The CSV spreadsheet uploaded at its backend contains all the metadata about individual advertisements and the books or collections they are from. The images themselves are uploaded on Frappe as well. While Frappe is best known as the framework behind ERPNext, it can also be used for managing websites with database requirements (such as archival projects).

The website building is supported by professional developers Sai Phanindra and Saketh, both cat petters and enthusiasts of open source software. The two of them have created the website and continue to support the maintenance of the Frappe server. 

Creating the archive has also highlighted the kinds of technology one can imagine for Sindhi as a language, as well as the current limitations. For example, OCR technology for Sindhi advertisements was deeply missed. Maybe someday, one will get there too.

Challenges

Because different kinds of capacities were needed to make the archive live as a digital archive, it has been a tough journey. The work itself was straightforward: my previous experience with the PG Sindhi Library had taught me what it takes to work with resources and organise them. People management turned out to be more challenging this time. 

Remote collaboration, especially during the development of the website, has been particularly draining to manage. People working asynchronously meant lots of challenges in communication and delays for the project. One developer promised a seamless, customised solution that would be easy for me to maintain as a non-programmer, but later took the entire website offline. Lesson learned: always be careful about who you entrust with access to your infrastructure. 

Another takeaway: if you are working without institutional support, consider using free, simpler, low-tech options like Google Sites or WordPress/Blogger/Medium. They may lack some functionalities such as basic search, but they won’t hold your work at ransom. Technology requires time, energy, money, and trust. The first three can be expensive, but trust is priceless. Work with collaborators who understand and respect your vision.

All this is not to say that things are always intentional. As I speak to more people in different kinds of collaborations in data science or any kind of product development, I’ve noticed that things can quickly turn sour. People go from one vendor to another because the technical collaborators do not fully grasp the socio-political intentions, constraints, or sensitivities around a project.

Theoretical Implications

Beyond methodology and infrastructure, this project also raises questions about what constitutes archival material worthy of preservation. The PG Sindhi Library has several books that are a sheer delight to hold and look at. One of the things that makes these books so expressive is that they contain advertisements. For me, for example, they bring back the memories of a confectionery I enjoyed growing up in Ulhasnagar. 

But they also shock me with things, products, and services I had no idea were connected with Sindhis. The film advertisements, for instance, by Sindhi producers; some of them low-brow, some of them more mainstream. These provide a glimpse of the economic and cultural networks that sustained and connected Sindhi communities, and that have gone largely undocumented. In this way, commercial ephemera becomes as valuable as traditional literary materials.

And a lot of them came from anonymous well-wishers.

Browsing the advertisements becomes a lesson in print history, design history, and book history. And Partition history. The Partition of India can be studied through the traces it leaves on communities and identities in unimagined ways. The advertisements speak of a publishing, reading, and entrepreneurial community uprooted from its geography. In this sense, the Sindhi Halchal Archive serves as an unlikely springboard – broadening the horizons of research into Sindhi print culture and its many entanglements.

What Next? In my next post, I will share the details of another archive, Sindhi Sanchaya which is built out of the similar need to create an ecosystem for Sindhi rather than a standalone project. Stay tuned.