I am an inactive volunteer (at present and been so for a while now), chanced upon this
thread. In the past one of the projects I worked upon and was hoping would see light of
day, some day, was release of thousands of India related images by the British Library
under a free license. These images are part of our Indian national heritage and are of
educational and cultural importance. They are from the 17th to the 20th century and
include oil paintings, murals, portraits, photographs etc.
In 2014 I was in London for Wikimania, with the help of Jon Davies (then ED), Jonathan
Cardy and Andrew Gray we had a meeting at BL and there was a serious effort to make this a
reality but it was just about the time other things took precedence in personally for me
and Wikimedia went on the back-burner. I attempted to revive talks on my visit to London
last summer, in vein.
If anyone is willing to take this up, I would be most happy to share all the
correspondence and minutes of meetings from the past (offlist) as well as try to put them
in touch with BL (though WMUK might be better at the latter) and try to help out where
possible, though I have severe time constraints which would prevent me from playing an
active part in such an attempt.
Regards,
________________________________
From: Wikimediauk-l <wikimediauk-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of John
Lubbock <john.lubbock(a)wikimedia.org.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, February 8, 2017 1:57:12 PM
To: Charles Matthews; UK Wikimedia mailing list
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Digitisaton of East India Company/ India Office records
If you have ideas Charles, I'm very happy to hear them. I just don't know what our
connections with the Indian diaspora in the UK are right now and whether they'd be
interested in doing something on these records, rather than preferring something on their
own culture. You're welcome to propose ideas and to suggest people we might work with.
I'm all ears. :)
John
On 8 February 2017 at 13:52, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com<mailto:charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com>>
wrote:
On 08 February 2017 at 12:46 John Lubbock
<john.lubbock@wikimedia.org.uk<mailto:john.lubbock@wikimedia.org.uk>> wrote:
There's quite a lot of interest in this subject also because of the BBC series Taboo,
which paints the East India Company in a pretty bad light that is quite believable given
what is known about them
I think Taboo is great, at a graphic novel sort of level. People should know, though, that
the East India Company was run by a board of 25 directors, rather than Jonathan Pryce
doing a lot of swearing.
Among interesting employees were John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Love Peacock.
If anybody wants a somewhat long but illuminating read on them, I'd very much suggest
the historian William Dalrymple's piece in the
Graun<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-o…
from a couple of years ago.
I don't know that Dalrymple is taken seriously as a historian. I recently enjoyed In
the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles, by Nigel Barley, which complements Taboo in its own
way.
Personally, I do think that if possible we should look at the possibility of bringing this
collection onto Wikimedia projects, but I don't think it would be an appropriate
project for trying to work with the Indian Wikimedia chapter or with the Indian diaspora
here. I do think we should look at how we could do that in future with subject matter
which is less contentious though.
For heavens sake, WP has the mechanisms for dealing with contentious subjects.
Communications being what they were, until the invention of the telegraph, there was a big
disjunction between what the Company could get done from London; and what actually went on
in South and East Asia. And what UCL are working on for the West Indies, someone should
attempt for the East Indies.
Charles
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