Archives of Professor Samik Bandyopadhyay

Tabbed

Description & Rationale

The four hundred files in this collection contain newspaper and periodical clippings; reviews of plays, performances, exhibitions and films; the collector’s own notes from lectures and seminars attended over six decades or more; notes from lectures delivered by him and research projects he has been part of; correspondence with authors, filmmakers, theatre directors, playwrights, painters and scholars whose works Prof. Bandyopadhyay has reviewed, critiqued, introduced or translated, as well as those whom he has interviewed for publication or broadcast/telecast; documents and correspondence related to Bandyopadhyay’s engagements in various official and advisory capacities with governmental and institutional bodies like the central Sangeet Natak Akademi, the National School of Drama, the West Bengal State Bangla Akademi, the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Asiatic Society (Kolkata) and the Central Board of Film Certification. Along with this, the archive contains an extensive collection of tickets, brochures, programs of theatre, music and dance performances from all regions of India, as well as the United States of America, United Kingdom, Sri Lanka, former USSR and Germany from the 1950s onwards. These documents can serve as valuable archival sources for future research in the field of performance studies and cultural history in South Asia. The materials are spread across the wide range of interests that Professor Bandyopadhyay has had over the years: cultural and performance studies, social and cultural anthropology, literature, theatre, urban history, lexicography, Marxism, contemporary history and politics, editing and publishing, translation, cinema, visual arts and art history, as well as the regional cultural histories of Manipur, Bengal, Maharashtra and Karnataka. There is also an accumulation of research material from projects Bandyopadhyay has worked on, related to various institutional bodies and publications like the Anthropological Survey of India, the Asiatic Society, Oxford University Press, Seagull Books, the Sahitya Samsad, the National School of Drama and the Film & Television Institute of India, Pune amongst others.

Reasons for consideration:

We are, to be absolutely honest, deeply anxious about the condition of these papers many of which date back to the 1950s and 1960s. Prof Bandyopadhyay, as an individual scholar, does not have access to the resources and infrastructure to preserve these materials physically in good condition. There is a critical dearth of space in his private residence, as well as dust and other environmental factors that are fast adding to the brittle and fragile condition of many of these files. While the books in Prof Bandyopadhyay’s collection can later be donated to a library or trust, the papers in these old files are unlikely to be preserved in good condition. Our own archive at CSSSC does not have the physical space to store and take care of so many files. It is urgent, therefore, that we quickly digitize this material before some of it is destroyed by weather conditions and lack of care. Additionally, much of this valuable documentary history will be much less useful without Prof Bandyopadhyay’s important commentary on them. In view of his steadily weakening health, we also wish to urgently undertake these interviews without causing him more physical strain than he can bear at his age. Hence, keeping in view both the fragile condition of the actual material as well as the weakening health and advanced age of the collector, we cannot underline enough the urgency of undertaking the work of digitization and generating relevant metadata for the proposed archive as soon as possible.

Author(s):

Samik Bandyopadhyay and others

Source Format:

Paper

Other Paper

Audio

Target Format:

Digital

Program:

SAMP

Resource Types:

Archival materials

Government documents

Monographs

Newspapers

Printed Ephemera

Other

Regions:

South Asia

Countries of Origin:

Germany

India

Russia

United Kingdom

United States

Proposal Contributors:

The principal investigator in this project is Dr. Trina Nileena Banerjee, Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta.

Posted:

Oct 6, 2020 10:49am

Updated:

Jul 21, 2021 10:15am

Activity

Status	Current	Description
Flagged	no	The proposal is flagged for further research.
Vetted	no	The proposal has been examined and vetted.
Ballotted	no	The proposal is currently on a committee ballot.
Approved	yes	The proposal has been selected for reformatting. Reformatting efforts are pending.
Reformatted	no	The proposal has been reformatted and access information is now posted.
Inactive / Declined	no	No longer under consideration for reformatting.