Archives on Presidency College to be launched on December 12
kolkata: Scholars from the Presidency University and the University of Chicago have prepared a unique archives on the history and development of Hindu/Presidency College.
The archives will be formally launched on December 12.
The University of Chicago and the British Library have provided grants to prepare the archives.
This archives is a collection of a great variety of documents pertaining to the institutional life of the first institution of western education in Asia, which started as the Hindu College in 1817, and was renamed as the Presidency College in 1854. The College was a premier site of learning in India over the two centuries of its existence.
The Hindu/Presidency College archives consists of documents testifying the rich institutional history of the college, including government proceedings, establishment records, periodical pieces, memoirs, college magazines, alumni publications, departmental histories, seminar society registers, student miscellanies, images, and more.
Two registers of the Seminar Library of the Philosophy department are more than a century old. Subhas Chandra Bose was the secretary of the seminar library.
There are documents prepared by Jagadish Chandra Bose, who requested the British government to give grant to set up a campus outside the city to carry on research on the plants.
He attached the appreciation he had received from the scholars in Europe and the United States on the subject. However, the British
government did not give any grant or helped him to carry on with his research.
Another document shows Prasanta Chandra Mahalanabis who had submitted a concept document to the British Education department for setting up a separate institute to study Statistics. Mahalanobis' Statistics laboratory was under the Physics department of Presidency College.
In 1838-39, some teachers of Natural Science department (Physics was then called Natural Science) had inspired some students to draw diagrams of solar eclipse that had taken place going against
the Hindu tradition that one should not look at the sun during solar eclipse.
The diagram which was judged best was kept at the college.
Work on the archives was started by the distinguished Professor of Humanities at Presidency University, Swapan Chakravorty in 2017 during the bicentenary of the institution. Further expansion of this collection has been carried out by Rochona Majumdar (University of Chicago), Sukanya Sarbadhikary (Presidency University) and Upal Chakrabarti (Presidency University).
