This article examines the emergence of mass letter-writing in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial north India, a region marked by the growth of an unprecedented labour mobility, postal expansion, vernacular print, and workers' literacy. It narrates how workers' and their family members' abilities and failures to read and write letters shaped their experiences of the emerging transnational labour mobility and explains how the letter-writing by the subaltern produced new sociabilities and anxieties that both colonial and indigenous elites feared and attempted to discipline and control through letter-writing manuals.  [Access article here]

The Archive Box is a series featuring global urban historians reflecting on their archival experience, and on the practical and theoretical challenges they faced while working with a variety of archives in different cities across the world.

From small libraries in Kolkata to the British Library in London, through police records and pulp fiction published in late nineteenth-century colonial Calcutta, Anindita Ghosh reflects on her journey through archives, on the tension between formal and vernacular archives, and on the crucial importance of the latter for writing the urban histories of ordinary people. [Access article here]