Medhavi Gandhi: Championing Open Knowledge in India

Following our series of interviews with Wikimedian gender organizers, we, from the project Wiki and GLAM: Harnessing Knowledge to Foster Gender Equality, spoke with Medhavi Gandhi (New Delhi,  1986, Pronouns She/Her). Medhavi is an independent cultural practitioner working to build public access to cultural knowledge through editorial practice, research, institutional partnerships, and projects that bring collections, research, and stories to wider audiences. She founded The Heritage Lab, a platform for experimenting with how museum collections and cultural knowledge are presented, shared, and experienced online. Previously, Medhavi founded the Happy Hands Foundation, an organization that worked with artisan communities to foster youth and public engagement with traditional arts. In recent years, she has served as a Strategy and Leadership Advisor for Art+Feminism and as their Regional Ambassador in India. She lives between Berlin and Chandigarh.

As this brief introduction suggests, Medhavi is a cultural powerhouse. Our conversation with her was so engaging that it was sometimes hard to take notes, and we did our best to capture the many remarkable activities this young woman—who began her career in street theater—has been involved in. Social concerns and women’s rights have been at the forefront of Medhavi’s work, alongside cultural heritage and the arts—especially traditional crafts such as puppetry. While working in North India with a group of puppeteers (watch video here), she realized that women were making the puppets but not performing on stage. She came to understand that supporting women in claiming space requires engaging the people around them. Ensuring that husbands and other family members recognize the importance of women’s work is not so different from inviting communities in museums or libraries to participate in an edit-a-thon. As Medhavi put it, “we, the volunteers, the Wikimedians, eventually leave, but they remain.”

It was also through her work with crafts that Medhavi was introduced to the museum world, as she developed close ties with the National Handicrafts Museum and Hastkala Academy in New Delhi. Building on these experiences, she founded the Happy Hands Foundation in 2009, an organization she led until 2016. In 2017, Medhavi became involved with Wikimedia as the Art+Feminism Ambassador in India. In the process of creating content for Wikimedia projects, she encountered a well-known challenge faced by many Wikimedians working on gender diversity: the dearth of reliable sources. To address this issue, she partnered with galleries such as JNAF and Marg, an Indian art magazine published since 1946, to create content about women artists. They also focused on women artists such as Hashirashi Deviand Indusudha Ghosh in a series of zines produced as part of their Art+Feminism campaign that was supported by XP-Pen India (a tablet company) in partnership with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and the National Institute of Design.

Another solution is to invite artists to contribute their own archives. A prevalent feeling among women artists, and women in general, is that their personal lives are not part of History with a capital “H.” Yet these private stories are rich in information, and oral history is an accepted methodology in historical research. Conversations, photographs, and personal documents can feed Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, which in turn can support Wikipedia articles, and so on. This process of turning data into narrative is central to Medhavi’s work.

Challenges and Opportunities

Notability was not, however, the only issue Medhavi faced in her partnerships with museums and galleries. While museums in India welcome scholars and academic researchers, groups Wikimedia editors may not be their primary audience. In some cases, institutions require a letter of introduction from a university in order to grant access to their archives; other GLAM institutions do not allow visitors to bring their own laptops into their facilities. Access becomes much easier when there is a supportive partner within the institution. Still, after the events take place, institutions are usually convinced of the value of outside contributors and become more open to future collaborations. Of course, we cannot generalize: DAG, an art gallery and museum, has been a strong supporter of Medhavi’s projects, hosting edit-a-thons alongside their exhibitions and providing giveaways such as art books for the best editors. The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art has also been a valuable partner.

She has also encountered some reluctance among curators, which is understandable, as knowledge is central to their livelihood. To navigate this kind of situation, Medhavi began asking them for lists of topics, ensuring that she had at least a starting point for Wikimedia projects. By doing so, “we know what we don’t know,” as she put it. She approaches her work by identifying problems and proposing solutions through a range of strategies, seeing her work as an act of “troubleshooting.”

However, Medhavi is aware that it’s important to deal with problems from a broader perspective. She envisioned the Open Knowledge Fellowship, aimed at emerging researchers and GLAM professionals. The program is also a call to action for South Asian / Indian cultural professionals to critically engage with cultural collections and contribute their “fresh perspective” while building a repository of open knowledge resources. The fellowship has been supported by Wikimedia Foundation through rapid grants; last year it was in collaboration with Wikimedia UK and they hope to partner with other affiliates and chapters in the year to come. Although the fellowship does not focus specifically on gender, it has contributed to the creation or the improvement of articles, such as the Wikipedia page on Indian social reformer Pandita Ramabay.

Another issue when partnering with museums is that they have a different understanding of what constitutes a successful initiative. Museums are pressured to demonstrate that they attract large numbers of visitors to secure funding and justify their projects. While, for us Wikimedians, an editing event with twelve participants might be considered a success, this number is negligible when compared to the audience of a museum exhibition. At the same time, museums and other GLAM institutions are increasingly expected to maintain a strong online presence. Wikimedia is therefore an ideal partner for collaboration in this area.

Despite these challenges, Medhavi believes that museums offer significant opportunities for partnership with Wikimedia, especially in relation to gender. She explained that museums are already expected to address gender inequality—occasions such as March 8 can serve as an effective entry point for engagement. With time, institutions may come to recognize the value of this work and develop further initiatives. Medhavi also reminded us that the museum workforce is highly feminized, a pattern that extends to other GLAM institutions as well.

Lessons learned

• Use different tools, don’t be limited to Wikimedia projects when tracing a strategy. You can partner with content creators outside of the Wikimedia world and plan a gender-themed event that will eventually feed Wikipedia pages, Wikidata, etc. 
• When planning initiatives with communities, be sensitive to their situation: your team will leave, your collaborators will remain. This is particularly important when developing projects in traditional communities where women are expected to stay at home, or where LGBTQIA+ people still face strong discrimination.
• Take advantage of the demand for GLAMs to be more gender inclusive. Although there may be many women in the institution, this does not always reflect on their exhibitions or collections. 
• When dealing with senseless bureaucracy, sometimes we must do first, ask later. Of course, be mindful of the needs of collections and of the impact that your event will have for the professionals that work at the institution after you leave.

Learn more

This is the fourth blog post in our series for the Wiki and GLAM: Harnessing Knowledge to Foster Gender Equality project.

• Read about the WELx and the Belém Library partnership in Portugal.
• Read about Wikiesfera and their GLAM projects in Spain.
• Read about the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, and their Wikimedian-in-Residence program. 
• Find out about the project Wiki and GLAM : Harnessing Knowledge to Foster Gender Equality.

Join us!

Want to learn more about GLAM partnerships for gender equality? Join our Telegram channel or send an email to wikiglamgender@gmail.com to learn about our next events.