Before the Digital Age: People and Purpose

Remembering Father Stan Swamy (1937–2021). A dedicated Jesuit priest and fierce champion of tribal rights, he spent his life standing up for the marginalized and oppressed in India. His legacy of courage, compassion, and relentless pursuit of justice continues to inspire us all. Rest in peace.

Our early efforts to bridge data and social reality were set during my time as a student at the Madras School of Social Work from 1979 to 1981. Serving as a research associate and documentation expert under Prof. T. Krishnan Nair grounded my thought in social reality. To deeply understand archiving, I was sent to the Indian Social Institute in Bangalore, where I met its Director, Father Stanislaus Lourduswamy, S.J. I instantly admired his simplicity, entirely devoid of self-assumption. For the younger generations reading, Father Stan Swamy, as widely known later, dedicated his life to standing alongside marginalized tribal communities. Long before he became a historic symbol of resistance, he was a gentle soul who warmly accepted a young student and encouraged my learning.

Following the conclusion of my formal stint with Professor Nair around 1983, my path shifted; these collaborative documentation efforts and regional network milestones were entirely a matter of volunteering. It was never my profession, but rather a space of shared conviction. Technological milestones aside, my understanding of what we built during the pre-1990 Documentation Centres Meets (DCM) remains shaped by a simple truth: ideas carry moral consequences, and knowledge belongs to relationship, not isolation.

This spirit of collaborative utility found expression in a wider network that preceded our formal urban sessions. Long before systems were digitized, the operational realities of our information network were forged in the intense peasant and agrarian struggles at Asha Kendra in Puntamba, Maharashtra, and nurtured within the quiet, reflective isolation of the Goa meets hosted at the Xavier Retreat House, perched beautifully on a hill overlooking the creek right between Baga and Anjuna beaches.

The collective vision built across those rural landscapes, championed by John D’Souza and Anjum Rajabali through the Centre for Education and Documentation (CED), Bombay, culminated in the landmark 1989 Chennai DCM. My own involvement remained a small role, acting simply as a temporary threshold to bring logistics and technology into alignment.

When the historical lens focuses on that 1989 convergence, it remembers an incredible gathering of community goodwill. Fr. A. Tagore opened up the progressive student spaces at AICUF for our deliberations. The late M.A. Abraham, Chairman of Aban Loyd Chiles, graciously loaned a state-of-the-art 386 computer system with a colour monitor—valued at an astronomical three lakh rupees—for three days free of cost.

To make this operational, we transformed our Anna Nagar living room into an ad-hoc communications hub, using a battery-powered pocket modem over a standard telephone line to test early database synchronization with international experts from Norway and Hong Kong. We gathered to bridge methodologies—a journey that concluded with a quiet strategy retreat down the coast at the Tamil Nadu Tourism hotel in Mahabalipuram (now Sterling Resorts).

My active association as a key collaborator within these alternative networks would have naturally continued, had it not been for my relocation to the United States in 1990. Yet, while distances grew and paths diverged, the foundational anchor remained unmoved; Professor Nair and I maintained our close association and shared regard across the decades, a bond that continued uninterrupted until his final illness and death. It was, from the very beginning, an orientation not toward personal certainty, but toward collective responsibility.