PRAJNYA RESOURCE CENTRE FOR WOMEN IN POLITICS AND POLICY

A SINGLE-LOCATION CLEARING-HOUSE FOR QUANTITATIVE, QUALITATIVE AND ARCHIVAL DATA ON WOMEN IN POLITICS AND POLICY-MAKING

At our founding, we envisioned a public sphere in which women's work is visible. Our mission is the creation of a comprehensive, continually updated, publicly accessible resource centre on the participation of women in the politics and policy structures of South Asia.The Prajnya Resource Centre on Women in Politics and Policy sought to fill the gap created by scattered and unsystematically compiled information in this field. There were to be several components to this project:

• A user-generated visual archive of photographs of women participating in the public sphere.
• A series of oral histories and life-stories of individual women who have played a pivotal part in politics and society.
• The creation of a statistical database which will compile salient statistics and lists of women in politics and policy-making.

These would be supplemented over time by the collection of other archival materials. In addition, our vision for the Resource Centre includes a good library on the subject and we hope that our efforts will encourage individual women in public life and their families to regard our Centre as an appropriate repository for their papers and photographs.

The Prajnya Resource Centre has, over 15 years, charted its own path. The Prajnya Archives have a small collection of photographs contributed by users that show several facets of women's presence in the public sphere, which some of us take for granted but that remains a precious and precarious opportunity for too many. Our oral history project progresses slowly but we now have a small collection of interviews. In our early years, we ran an annual Intercollegiate Quiz Contest on Women in South Asia. Occasional projects like Reflections on Resilience highlight the gendered consequences of public policy, in this case, during the pandemic.

The most consistent Prajnya Resource Centre project has been our monthly talk series, originally named the Women's History Roundtable Series and now called The Prajnya Gender Talks. You can read more about the series here.

Visit the Prajnya Archives to learn about the different ways in which women have made a difference to the world around them, and do contribute your own photos to our collection!

Women's History at Prajnya

Through our LifeStories interviews, we reach out to women to document their accounts of their lives and work in the public sphere and in the context of public events. We have done both video and audio interviews, and photographs from these are placed in the Prajnya Archives.

Other women's history initiatives include "The History Room" series of interviews with historians who write about women's histories and gender issues. We have also organise heritage walks and quizzes around local Chennai women's history landmarks. You can read about these on our blog.