Recording for posterity

As he leafed through the slim copy of the Digdarshan Patrika,the first Bengali language magazine published in 1818,Devajit Bandyopadhyay,a theatre singer,instinctively knew he had laid his hands on a rare piece of history. He had picked up the magazine from a street-side shop in Kolkata. Bandyopadhyay handed the magazine over to the School of Cultural Texts and Records SCTR at Jadavpur University,who digitised the copy and archived it for future reference.

Several such rare documents of our cultural evolution have found a new lease of life at SCTR. The project was set up to document and explore the textual basis of society and culture, says Sukanta Chaudhuri,professor at the Universitys department of English and the director of SCTR. We are in the process of recovering mainstream literature,various subaltern texts,sub-literatures,oral material etc that hold a mirror to the culture graph of our society, he says.

Chaudhuri and his colleagues have taken up the project of digitising and archiving a large volume of old and rare Bengali drama texts. The process includes procuring books from several sources,scanning them and arranging them chronologically with catalogues.

We are working on nearly 400 books,some of which date back to the early 19th century, says Chaudhuri.

There are books like the first editions of Dinabandhu Mitras Neel Darpan and Lilabati. Bharat Chandra Roys Bidya Sundar 1818,Motilal Roys collected jatra compositions mid 19th century,Krishnakamal Goswamis works of jatra and 37 rare volumes of Sangeet Bigyan Prabeshika. Theres a sizeable collection of theatre song books. Its hard to get another copy of these song and drama books from the 19th century. Hence the need to digitise them, says Chaudhuri.

SCTR is also archiving the personal documents,manuscripts and letters of early 19th century Australian poet Charles Harpur. Most of these manuscripts were written by people who had taken dictations from him, says Chaudhuri. While the works of these authors are available in modern printed versions,the need to archive the originals stem from their significance in palaeography the art of studying old prints and manuscripts.

The University had also begun work on archiving rare Hindustani classical music,more than 20 shooting scripts of filmmaker Tapan Sinha and Dinen Gupta,a large selection of theatre veteran Badal Sircars manuscripts and personal accounts of the oldest refugees who settled in India post-Partition.

Anuradha Chanda,former history professor at the university,is heading a project that is trying to recover and archive texts in the now obsolete Sylheti-Nagri script. Chanda had made several trips to Bangladesh and Cachar district in Assam to recover books,pamphlets,lyrics and manuscripts in the extinct script.

SCTR is also archiving street literature. These are mainly chap books,found in markets,procured from train vendors,to street side shops. These books are invaluable testimonies of sub cultures in our society, says Chaudhuri.