Archiving history

KOCHI: Jaijith James has over 3,000 newspapers in his collection. This Kochi-native has been collecting and filing interesting news stories across three categories — news articles, photographs, and Kochi’s history. Though he started the collection as a hobby in school, Jaijith holds somewhat of a key to the past with him now. 

“In school, I used to cut photographs and news articles of sports stars from newspapers and paste them in books. During high school, I started focusing more on national and political events. I had to take a break in between because my grandfather complained about me spoiling the newspapers,” quips Jaijith.He revived the hobby in 1997 when he was invited by his father’s friend to click photographs of Mother Teresa when her body was kept in a church in Calcutta for public viewing. 

“Among many renowned photographers from all around the world, I stood there and clicked few pictures on my film camera. I never got to see them, however. So I collected the images that came in newspapers and documented Mother Teresa’s death in the form of a magazine, which I still hold intact,” says Jaijith.
Since then, Jaijith has been finding time amidst tight work schedules to ask around among his friends and relatives and find interesting pieces of news. He had a heap of newspapers in his house.

“Taking photographs and articles from the newspaper directly and pasting it on different books was a time-consuming act. Often, the date, name of the photographer and mastheads went missing. To get hold of all the necessary information, I started collecting the whole sheet with the news article, marking it with a pen. As the sheet started to pile up, I classified the entire lot into three different categories and neatly filed it during the last year’s lockdown,” explains Jaijith.

The collection comprises of Princess Diana’s death, Saddam Hussein execution, 9/11 attack, Iraq war, Parliament attack, India’s first voter, releasing Palestinian prisoners, and several other historical photographs. There are also nerve-wracking crime stories, personal interviews of eminent personalities like K R Narayanan and Mahatama Gandhi’s personal secretary V Kalyanam, and stories of many real-life heroes.

Jaijith plans to create a photo album and high-end digital video with all the content eventually. He also intends to honour news photographers who recorded these events with a book on the world’s best news photographer. “The plan is in the pipeline. It is not an easy task to reach a location and capture the right moment at the right time,” says Jaijith.

Even in a digital world where information and photographs could be retrieved in a heartbeat, Jaijith treasures the value in this method of collection. “Though this form of reference and collection is outdated, revisiting the same gives me a sense of pride. It is proof of my consistency and perseverance,” says Jaijith.