Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore the Sound Archive of Berlin which holds a collection of records with Himalayan prisoners of World War I. With the help of a vast amount of records, it will try to figure out to what extent could these records with prisoners of war be understood as “representations of the self”?

Paper long abstract:

The Sound Archive of the Humboldt University Berlin holds a collection of more than one hundred records with prisoners of World War I who came from the Himalaya. In service of the British they fought on the battlefields of Europe and were imprisoned in the German camps in Wünsdorf and Zossen, close to Berlin. A vast amount of records were produced by 'Königlich Preußische Phonographische Kommission' containing songs, stories and other audio samples in more than two hundred languages.

Around the turn of the 21st century, all records were digitized and made accessible for scholarly research. But until now very little has been carried out and the focus remained largely on their production process. Moreover, records with prisoners of war from the Himalaya remain completely unexplored since almost a century. This paper will shed light on this desideratum through the method of translation and critical hermeneutic analysis. It will try to answer the questions such as: To what extent could these records in the languages of Himalayan prisoners be understood as "representations of the self"? Did the prisoners have agency in the production of the records? Or were they merely saying or singing what the German scholars asked or ordered them to? Do the prisoners represent themselves in these records or were they represented by the German researchers? What was the initiative behind the selection of stories or songs? An exploration of this almost forgotten archive will help us to answer these questions.