Plaques of Presidency

In August 2012, Presidency University, Kolkata hosted what is perhaps the country's first conference on (the) Digital Humanities. With collaborative international projects and an undergraduate Gen-Ed course, the DH initiative at Presidency has made significant leaps. The pinnacle of our achievement as teachers is, of course, the success of our students. In that spirit of pride, I congratulate the undergraduate final-year students from the English and other Humanities departments for having completed the first student-led DH project at Presidency. Like much of our built environment that we take for granted in our quotidian lives, the many plaques, paintings and statues in Presidency have rich stories to tell us, whether of our university or of the history of Bengal. Using digital tools to recover such lost histories, the Presidency Plaques Project (PPP) takes you on a journey back in time but one that is, nevertheless, very important for appreciating our present. Once again, it is with much pride that I announce the Presidency Plaques Project. I hope you enjoy looking through it and learning from it as much as I have.

– Dr. Souvik Mukherjee

Assistant Professor and Head of Department, Department of English, Presidency University, Kolkata, India

Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a scholar extraordinary, had once debunked the typical Calcutta adda as useless. However, one such adda may be credited for the genesis of the Presidency Plaques Project. At a time, which suspects the Humanities departments to be musty and outmoded, Presidency University, ever a site of the lively teacher-student adda, continues to cultivate regular interdepartmental exchanges. The Digital Humanities (DH) programme, offered by the Department of English, has played a crucial role in bringing the students of the other Humanities departments close to each other. The idea of a student-led DH project was suggested by Shruti Roy Choudhury, a student of the Bengali department, pursuing the GenEd course at the English department, which, under the guidance of Dr. Souvik Mukherjee, Assistant Professor at the Department and the DH course instructor, bloomed to become the Presidency Plaques Project (PPP) – a digital archive of the monuments within the Presidency University campus, College Street.

Monuments have immense historical significance as embodiments of collective memory. The narrative potential of monuments, however, has often been overlooked by traditional history writings, one of the reasons being a lack of proper documentation. The few existing records too, hardly manage to explore the rich narratives encased within. The stories which the statues and plaques of Presidency hold, thus face a dual silence – through the lack of proper archiving as well as the limitations of traditional records.

Our project becomes one of a kind as an effort at digital storytelling, mapping and archiving of the monuments within the university. It would nevertheless be bragging to deny that this project is a revisionary endeavour in ways: a meticulous record of the mementos in the college (now Arts) library by Mr Gokulnath Dhar, ex-librarian at the Presidency College, may be found in the Presidency College Magazine (1921-22). Further, catalogues of monuments in Calcutta for the years 1902 and 1910, by the Public Works Department of colonial Bengal are still available ( see  https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.70444 ), as well as an archival document on the  tombs and monuments of Bengal , edited by C.R. Wilson in 1896.

Our biggest inspirations for this project have been ‘ The Scottish Cemetery in Bengal’ Digital Archive  and ' The Dutch Cemetery in Chinsurah' Digital Archive , both led by Dr. Souvik Mukherjee. We are extremely grateful to Dr. Mukherjee for his supervision and active interest at every step of our project, and of course for showing us the ropes in the fascinating world of Digital Humanities.

We are grateful to the Presidency University administration for their encouragement. With its bicentenary celebration, Presidency University saw some significant efforts at archiving and restoring its history and heritage. The Presidency University Museum, curated by Professor Swapan Chakravorty, and the Presidency University Digital Archives have been among of our chief inspirations in this project. We would also like to take this space to express our deep gratitude towards Professor Sumit Chakrabarti; his classroom is where we have often learnt to critically engage with the history of the colonial past. The best is reserved for the last - we thank our friends Shruti Roy Choudhuri (who deserves a special mention here, being the one to essentially initiate the project), Sriza Ray, Rumi Das, Aritro Bhattacharya and Debanjan Mahapatra for their tireless work in the photography of the monuments and initial collection of data.

Knowledge is endless, and any archive can be further enriched with more information. With this in view, we welcome further suggestions, data and questions. Thank you, and hope you enjoy this effort of ours.

– Sohini Sengupta and Sourav Chattopadhyay

( sohini98b@gmail.com ,  getsourav8@gmail.com ) 

Project Leaders:

Sohini Sengupta, Student (UG III), Department of English

Sourav Chattopadhyay, Student (UG III), Department of English

Photography and Data Collection:

Shruti Roy Choudhury, Student (UG II), Department of Bengali

Aritro Bhattacharya, Student (UG II), Department of English

Sriza Ray, Student (UG III), Department of English

Rumi Das, Student (UG III), Department of English

Debanjan Mahapatra, Student (UG III), Department of English

Advisor: Dr. Souvik Mukherjee

With the advent of colonialism, the 19th century formed an era of tumultuous change in the culture and education in India, and Presidency College became an important centre of colonial pedagogy. Established as Hindoo College in 1817, the institution stands as a witness of the great moment of rupture in the history of Bengal. But while the college becomes a site of history itself, multiple threads of historical narratives run within the campus, encased in the many statues and plaques it houses.

Any monument has multiple historical underpinnings to it – especially of remembrance and relatedness, which are often overlooked in causal and teleological historiographies; it forms a crucial interface of materiality and ontology. It is at the same time a thing of the past, present and the future – embodying a sort of Heideggerian “having-been-ness [that] temporalizes itself only from out of and in the future”. The statues and plaques at Presidency University too open themselves to such complex interpretations – they are gateways into the beings and memories of the past, as well as a call to read history in infinitely many ways. Spanning, even in their material existence, two centuries - some dating from the nineteenth century, some from the twentieth, some as recent as the first two decades of the twenty-first century, these monuments speak for the two-hundred-year-old legacy of this institution. The statues and plaques – many of them of individuals who came from distant lands to leave their mark on the institution – are proof of the global reach of Presidency, but more importantly they attest to the deep imprint that relationships between teachers and students leave – in this case, literally set in stone. While these monuments have certain stories to tell in terms of their presence, one should scrutinize the possibility of narratives on the level of omission as well. One finds no commemoration of the history of female presence in the campus – female students were formally allowed into the institution as late as 1944 (the college found its first female professor in Kajal Sengupta, in the Department of English, in 1959). The absence of any statues or plaques in the campus commemorating a woman speaks significantly in terms of the gender index. Further analysis may also be carried out on the register of the material used in the construction of these monuments - their size, colour and even more importantly, their creators. This StoryMap hopes to open up conversations on matters both seen and unseen about these statues and plaques.

Serving as a digital archive of the monuments that Presidency University has housed over the years, this StoryMap attempts to ensure that ‘they [do not] disappear at the mercy of chance accidents; [that they] shine, as it were, like stars, some that seem close to us shining brightly from far off’. It also becomes a subtle chronicle of the evolution of institution – from Hindoo College to Presidency College to Presidency University – and of the countless lives that walked in and out through its gates for over two hundred years.

This archive offers the viewer a virtual tour across Presidency University. The first map provides an overview of the approximate locations of the various statues and plaques scattered across the campus. Keeping in mind the vitality of maps in any guided tour, this map is intended for audience both familiar and (especially for those) unfamiliar with the expanse of Presidency University. Following this, the StoryMap navigates through the different buildings of the University; the viewer can move from one entry to another by simply scrolling downwards, and navigate between buildings using the contents panel on top of the page. Owing to the large number of monuments housed in the Main Building, we have divided it into three subsections for the viewer’s convenience – the ground floor, the Arts Library (on the ground floor), and the first floor. Each entry offers a view of the statue/plaque in question, and offers an overview of the person or event it commemorates. Every entry is accompanied by a map, which marks a location associated with the education or service of the person in question. These maps attempt to reveal the growing network of education that spread worldwide, here seen with Presidency College as the common centre, offering the viewer a greater understanding of the state and progress of education, and allowing one a pan-global spatial movement even as the rest of the archive moves through time.

This brief section, which might almost be seen as a postscript to the above content, brings to the viewer a few plaques which are a part of Presidency University, but are not available for display at the present campus.

1. A little may be said here of the sculptors who designed these monuments. P. Swaries & Co. was a funeral director and monumental mason business started in his family by Peter Swaries (1815-1889) in 1851, located at 69 Bentinck Street Calcutta, 5 Clive Street Allahabad, & 56 or 59 Kings Road, Howrah. Brown and Co. was a funeral and monumental mason business, the gravestones designed by whom may be seen at the Scottish Cemetery and the Greek Cemetery. Gravestones designed by the sculptor, Dowling, also abound in these cemeteries.
2. A database of these monuments in tabular form may be found in the following document, collated by our team:  Presidency Statues and Plaques Archive .
3. A mirror site to this StoryMap may be accessed at:  Statues and Plaques at Presidency University. 

Find My Past –  https://findmypast.com 

Ancestry.com –  www.ancestry.com 

FamilySearch –  www.familysearch.org 

The above are genealogy websites where one can access wills, surveys and censuses (largely in the UK and USA, as well as other parts of the world), mostly for a fee. Find My Past also allows access to the India Office Records for a fee.

Internet Archive –  https://archive.org  - The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free access to thousands of books and media files, as well as 430 billion archived web pages.

Presidency Digital Archive –  www.presuniv.ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/xmlui  - The Presidency Digital Archive is a digital repository for a large number of the University’s documents – including the institution’s publications, theses and dissertations, as well as historical documents and records related to the University.  

Calcutta University Library Digital Collections –  https://caluniv.ac.in/digital-lib/ebook/ebook_catalogue_landing.php?cat=17  – The digital collections under the Calcutta University Library archive many texts in eBook format, the University Calendar, historical documents, dissertations and theses, as well as rare text and art collections.  

National Digital Library –  https://ndl.gov.in  – The National Digital Library is a project under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, acting as a digital repository for books, articles, lectures and other learning media. It aims to collect and collate metadata from several national and international libraries, as well as other sources.

Bose Institute –  www.jcbose.ac.in  – The official website of the Bose Institute offers valuable insight and material on the life and work of Jagadish Chandra Bose, apart from documenting the Institute’s activities.

Trove –  https://trove.nla.gov.au  – Trove is a collaboration between the National Library of Australia and many partner organisations around the country. It offers access to digital copies of newspapers government records, books and media files from all over Australia, as well as information on the continent from various sources.

Google Books -  https://books.google.co.in  – Google Books is a service from Google Inc. that allows one to search, as well as offers partial to complete access to, many books and magazines scanned by Google.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Papers –  www.netajipapers.gov.in  – This government repository contains many papers related to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, which have been declassified by the central government and made available to the public.

CrossAsia Repository –  https://crossasia-repository.ub.uni-heidelberg.de  – The CrossAsia Repository is the full-text server of the Virtual Library, CrossAsia, under the Universitäts-bibliothek, Heidelberg. It is a platform for publishing and archiving research material for Asian Studies. It offers access to the digital editions of over 2000 Asian periodicals.

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