Archives with over 200-yr-old records on Presidency College inaugurated

kolkata: The unique archives on the history of Presidency College, erstwhile known as Hindu College, were formally inaugurated on Monday at PC Mahalanobis Auditorium of the Presidency University.

The Presidency College Digital Archive was inaugurated in the presence of chief guests, including eminent alumni Bikash Sinha and Supriya Chaudhuri. The archives included government proceedings, periodicals, memoirs, autobiographies, college magazines, seminar society records, and student miscellanies, amongst other records for over two hundred years.

The auditorium had become a zone for nostalgia as alumni of Presidency University along with the present students were taken on the historical tour of the college by the three curators of the archives-Rochona Majumdar of the University of Chicago, Sukanya Sarbadhikary and Upal Chakrabarti of Presidency University.

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).

The University of Chicago and the British Library have provided grants to prepare the archives. This archive 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 the Presidency College in 1854. The College was a premier site of learning in India over the two centuries of its existence.

A long section at the corner of the auditorium was dedicated to the curated items retrieved by the curators. It was occupied by registers and files including the establishment bill book from the year 1851, the book issue register from 1882 to 1884, and letters to the principal from 1902, amongst others. The curators presented a dummy website of the digital archives. According to curator Upal Chakrabarti, the website will be further developed and be made more categorized. There will also be the addition of sub-categories. It will be ready soon. The work on archiving the history of the public institutions will continue with respect to the availability of logistics like funds, Chakrabarti said.

"The website we have created so far is big, vast, and voluminous, it needs a lot of money for maintenance. That kind of money right now, given the condition of the public institutions in India, cannot be expected from the government. We are in search of funds which will help us host this website permanently on the university server," he further said.