An Archive of Indian Social History
In April 1994 the first set of microfilm rolls reached the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences from the studio, that was the beginning of a very special type of archive, Hitesranjan Sanyal Memorial Collection at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, which is a premier social science research institute in eastern India. In the course of five years, the archive claimed its uniqueness to the scholars working on social history of Bengal and on Communist Party and Labour movement in India.
By ABHIJIT BHATTACHARYA
From the very beginning the archive aimed not to making a depository of documents available in Government archives or in other places. Rather it started restoration and preservation work of such documents which are neglected and in bad shape but useful tools for scholars all over the world working on the social and cultural history of colonial Bengal and the history of labour organizations and of the Communist Party in India and Great Britain. Those documents are scattered in different public institutions, libraries, and private collections.
Here one thing should be mentioned &endash; this project of preservation is also a project of rescuing documents from respective public institutions and libraries. It is difficult for these institutes to maintain all these things in proper order due to poor infrastructural support for preservation. Particularly, paper and photograph preservation are a quite difficult task in the tropical countries, where humidity level lies at some point between 70 to 100 per cent and temperature in between 35(infinity) to 42(infinity)c for most of the time in a year. Whereas the ideal climatic condition for preservation both of paper and photographic documents is: temperature 16(infinity) to 20(infinity)c and relative humidity should be maintained within 40% with maximum fluctuation of ± 5%. Moreover keeping original paper documents and photographs requires huge space for proper storage. Keeping all these things in mind, the Centre preferred to restore the textual documents in microfilm form and the visual documents both in colour transparencies and black and white negative forms. Still the climatic condition barely allows retaining the photographic documents without proper climatization, temperature, and humidity control in the depositories but it adds few more years to the life of these documents.
The Centre aimed to preserve documents related to the cultural and social history of the civil society in Bengal during the colonial period, and to fulfil the purpose it chose Bangla periodicals for preservation. Bangla text books and other monographs are equally important for such type of archive, but the emphasis was given on Bangla periodicals because these are the most neglected documents and hardly preserved anywhere systematically.
From 1818 to 1930 at least 2080 periodicals were published in Bangla (Banerjee 1936 & 1952 and Chatterjee: 1990 & 1994). Among them at least 50 periodicals continued for more than 25 years and 20 more than 50 years; and today barely 400 titles survived in a very poor condition in the public libraries and private collections. The 1857 press regulation act imposed by the British Government in India compelled the publishers for handing over copies of all published books to the Government but the periodicals were not included in the regulation. The India and Oriental Office Library in London preserved a considerable number of such printed books in their depository collected by the colonial Government ion India.
The Centre undertook the project of preservation of Bangla periodicals with financial assistance from ENRECA for a collaborative project between the Centre and the Roskilde University, Denmark on 'Nationalism, Modernity and Urban Culture' under the leadership of Partha Chatterjee, Pradip Bose, Gautam Bhadra, and Tapati Guha Thakurta. Abhijit Bhattacharya co-ordinates the documentation and reader services at the archive.
Hitesranjan Sanyal
Besides the microfilm holdings of Bangla periodicals, the Collection also has documents relating to the Communist Parties of India and Great Britain, materials on Positivism in 19th century Bengal and microfiches of Indian Census reports, 1872-1951. Of the Communist Party materials, Janayuddha was the Bangla organ of the Communist Party of India in the 1940s. The organ of the Third International published by the Communist Party of Great Britain, International Press Correspondence (1921-37), is a source book of world Communist and Labour movements. The Collection also has the proceedings and evidences of Meerut Conspiracy Case, framed by the colonial government against the Communist Pary and labour movement leaders in 1930.
The latest addition to this Archive is the collection of visual documents on colour transparencies and black and white negatives. The visual collection focuses mainly on the nineteenth and early twentieth century paintings, prints, illustrations, and photographs from various institutional and private collections in Calcutta, Mumbai, and London. This is part of an ongoing project of the Centre on 'Hybrid Genres: A Photographic Archive of Visual Material of the Late 19th and Early 20th Century in Various Calcutta Collections'. This project is funded by the India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore and being co-ordinated by Tapati Guha-Thakurta in collaboration with Amitabha Ghosh mainly for the photographic collection.
The visual collection is distinctly divided in two sections, one is the visual sources of early modern popular culture, i.e. paintings, lithographs etc. from nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal and another part is the studio and indoor, amateur, and professional photographers work from 1850 to the mid of the twentieth century. The visual archive proved its worth and is currently being used by many scholars from different parts of the world. At present, the archive has over 600,000 pages of printed documents on microfilm, over 3,000 colour transparencies of early modern popular paintings and prints and a considerable number of manuscripts and books from different private collections gifted to the archive.
The entire collection is named after Hitesranjan Sanyal, who, until his sudden death in 1988, was at the forefront of the Centre's researches in social and cultural history of Bengal.
Presently the Centre is keen to collaborate with South Asian
documentation centres all over the world for the betterment of
archiving system and for broader information network. One such
collaborator is the International Institute of Social History,
Amsterdam, which providing technical support and a collaborator of
research programme on South Asian history. A descriptive catalogue of
the archive (Bhattacharya, 1998) which was earlier published in book
form is now also available electronically from the internet site of
the IISH in PDF format from the following location:
http://www.iisg.nl/asia/csssc.htm.
Among many other, the Centre's academic interest is
presently revolving around the archive. It is expected that the
gradual development of the archive's combined pool of visual and
textual materials would open new avenues in the research on social
and colonial history of colonial Bengal. *
Abhijit Bhattacharya, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, can be reached at abhijit@csssc.ernet.in