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The Hitesranjan Sanyal Memorial Archive
A huge textual database, mainly focused on colonial Bengal

Colonial Bengal is known for its cultural vibrancy. This vibrancy did not remain concealed to colonial intellectuals in Calcutta who eventually started to celebrate themselves as a Bengal Renaissance; nor is it alien to modern scholars who continue to investigate colonial Bengal as a clue to colonialism as such and to the genesis of contemporary South Asia. The saga of Bengal as India's motor to modernity and the défilé of “Renaissance” luminaries such as Rammohan Ray, Ishwarchandra Bidyasagar, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore etc. is too well known to need repetition, and too established to go without revision.

The point is that the material calling for examination and re-examination is nothing less than spectacular. It has been claimed that the so-called Bengal Renaissance is the most fertile and best-documented period of any colonial society not only in South Asia, but worldwide. However this may be, colonial Bengal did produce an amazing amount of Bengali writing, starting from the very beginning of the 19th century and thus preceding other South Asian regions usually by several decades.

While the few canonical authors of the period have never ceased to be republished, the bulk of this literary output lies in the pages of the numerous journals of those times. The thematic range of this production is enormous and provides material to literary scholars, historians, sociologists, political scientists, linguists, anthropologists etc. alike. Access to these journals, however, has so far been difficult not only for non-Bengali scholars, but even for researchers working on the spot in Calcutta. Brittle condition of manuscripts, restricted availability at libraries and the lack of one central location have added up to make any systematic study quite tiresome.

The Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Archive is a huge collection of textual and visual materials mainly focused on colonial Bengal. Starting in 1993, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) has undertaken the task of microfilming and digitising a huge amount of textual sources, including all the major journals of colonial Bengal. This unique collection also extends to rare Bengali books, Assamese journals and books, as well as visual art and popular culture (such as specimens of historical Bengali advertising).

In the course of a Memorandum of Understanding between the CSSSC and the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University, the textual part of this collection is from now on going to be made available Savifa, the virtual library South Asia. This is hoped to be a significant step towards facilitating access to these materials and thereby stimulating further research.