College Chronicles
Established as the Hindu College in 1817, the present-day Presidency University has a history that is long and complex, as one of the premier institutions of colonial education that expanded the lessons of European enlightenment to the colony. Presidency College's history is also not to be read in isolation, but in conjunction with many of its neighboring institutions, including Calcutta University and Sanskrit College. In 'College Chronicles' we undertake a study of the past and present of this institution, with Dr Upal Chakrabarti (Dept. of Sociology) leading these interactions.
In the first session of this series, Dr Upal Chakrabarti elaborated on how the construction of Presidency Colleege was part of a much larger, social project. Narrating various phases of the institution across the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Chakrabarti connected the different sociohistorical contexts associated with the evolution of the College. He described disciplinary shifts, student cultures and administrative turns to intoduce the audience to the complex process that was the making of Presidency College: from Hindu College to the Presidency University.
Resources
A product of a project led by Dr Upal Chakrabarti (Presidency University), Dr Sukanya Sarbadhikary (Presidency University), and Dr Rochona Majumdar (University of Chicago), this archive contains a large collection of government proceedings, periodicals, memoirs, autobiographies, seminar society records, student miscellanies, etc: in short, a wide range of primary (published and unpublished) and secondary literature that sheds light on the institutional history of the Presidency College.
The repository is presently hosted with local access in the Department of Sociology, Presidency University, and may be accessed through prior notification and permission.
In picture: poster for the inauguration event of the archive.
