Archiving the Ancestors: Writing, Remembering, and Healing

Every year, during Pitra Paksh, I write letters to my ancestors.

When I started doing it, I did not think of this as archival work. I thought of it as something much more intimate, as a way of speaking to people who are no longer here.

Pitra Paksh (also called Pitru Paksha) is a period in the Hindu calendar traditionally dedicated to remembering and making offerings to deceased ancestors, or pitrs. Families may perform rituals, offer food and water, and remember those who came before them. It is a time in which the dead are not simply remembered as people who were, but as people who remain part of an ongoing relationship with the living. For me, that relationship has increasingly taken the form of letters.

My father died in 2023. Since his sudden death, I have learned so many stories about him. Be it small instances, memories, details of a life that I did not know when he was alive. My Nani Maa, my maternal grandmother, died in 2020, and I still love and remember her every day. My Chai Ji, my paternal grandmother, died in 2023. We had a fight briefly before her death, and writing to her is therefore also a way of coming to terms with something unresolved. My Nana Papa, my maternal grandfather, died when I was fourteen, so there are things I remember and many things I never got the opportunity to know. My Bau Ji, my paternal grandfather, died when I was three. My memories of him are therefore almost entirely mediated through what other people have told me.

This is where the letters become archival. Throughout the year, I hear things. Someone tells me a story about my father. A relative mentions something my Nani used to do. A family anecdote suddenly gives context to something I had remembered but never understood. A detail about my grandparents changes the way I understand the family I came from. I collect these things. Then, during Pitra Paksh, I bring them together. This is not quite the archive as we usually imagine it. 

Archives, particularly within the Western academic tradition, have often been associated with institutions, be it government records, official correspondence, property documents, photographs, manuscripts, newspapers, administrative files. They privilege what has been written down, preserved, cataloged, classified, and deemed worthy of preservation. Colonial regimes were particularly invested in producing such records documenting populations, languages, land, communities, families, and practices in ways that made them legible to the state, but what happens to histories that were never recorded in those forms?

What happens to the knowledge carried by grandmothers through me or the jokes whose meaning depended on knowing the person who told them? Through my leters ot my ancestors, I wanted to see what happens when we treat those things as archives too?

Writing letters to my ancestors is, for me, a small act of reclaiming what counts as historical evidence. I am not gonna pretend that a letter can recover the past exactly as it happened. Memory is selective. Totally subjective! Family stories change as they are retold, at least in my family. I inevitably remember some things and forget others. Other relatives may tell the same story differently. The archive I am creating is therefore not an objective record of my ancestors. It is a record of my relationship to them.

The letters document not only who my ancestors were, but whom they become in my memory over time. Each year, I encounter them differently because I am getting different. The same person can occupy a different place in my life as I age, learn, grieve, reconcile, or discover another family story. 

My ancestors did not necessarily leave behind papers that an academic historian would consider an archive. But they left traces. Traces of their stories, habits, relationships, conflicts, photographs, recipes, sayings, objects, memories, and the people they shaped. I am choosing to preserve those traces in my letters to them. The letter becomes both a ritual and a record to continue to accept and, at times, let go as well. Be it letting it go or keeping it going, the letters keep the dead in conversation with the living.

There is something powerful about writing to someone rather than simply writing about them when I write each letter. “My grandmother was…” creates historical distance. “Nani, today I remembered…” creates a relationship. The latter allows me to grief to coexist with historical memory. It also allows contradiction. For example, I can miss my Chai Ji and still acknowledge that we fought. I can discover new things about my father while accepting that I will never know the whole story of his life. I can love my Nani while knowing that my memories of her are partial. I can write to those ancestors whose lives I barely remember and still recognize that their absence has shaped my own life. An archive does not have to resolve these contradictions. Perhaps it should preserve them.

There is also something healing about this practice. Not healing in the sense of making grief disappear. I don't think grief works that way. However, I think writing gives grief somewhere to go. It creates a container for the things we did not say, the questions we never got to ask, the apologies that arrived too late, and the stories we are still discovering.

Sometimes the letter is loving. Sometimes it is angry. Sometimes it is simply an account of what happened that year.

I have realized that a variety of changing emotions is okay too.

Not everyone has to write a letter that I do during Pitra Paksh only. Not everyone practices my traditions, and not everyone has ancestors they feel safe or comfortable addressing. There is no obligation to turn grief into a ritual. However, whenever it is possible, I'd love it if one gives it a try.

Write to someone who has died. Tell them what happened this year. Tell them what you learned about them. Tell them what you wish they had known. Tell them you are angry. Tell them you miss them. Tell them about the person you have become. You do not even have to call it an archive, but keep those letters with yourself because one day, they may become one. Your archive of them!

Every year, my letters accumulate. Eventually, they will form their own small family archive not an authoritative genealogy, not a complete history, but a record of remembering. This is what I increasingly understand Pitra Paksh to offer me. As in, it is not only a ritual of looking backward. It is a practice of preservation. For me, the act of writing letters to them is also a practice of healing.

My letters often say:

I heard this about you.
I remembered this about you.
I learned something new.
I am still here. You are still here. 
You are still part of my story.

In writing my letters, I am not simply keeping memories of my ancestors alive. I am making an archive in which they can continue to exist.