• The Bichitra Project
The Bichitra Tagore Online Variorum Project was sanctioned by the Government of India as part of its programme for the celebration of Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary. It has been fully funded by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.
The project has been executed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Most of the material was sourced from Rabindra-Bhavana, Santiniketan. The digital images were prepared by C-DAC. Other project partners who have contributed material include the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat; the Central Library, Calcutta University; the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Indian National Library; the Central Library, Jadavpur University; and private collectors.
Bichitra is the biggest integrated knowledge site devoted to any author in any language to date. It comprises most versions of nearly all Rabindranath’s works in Bengali and English. It excludes most letters, speeches, textbooks and translations, except Tagore’s translations from his own Bengali. It includes digital images of virtually all his manuscripts and authoritative print versions (books and journals):47,520 pages of manuscripts and 91,637 pages of printed books and journals
plain-text transcripts of all these versions
a search engine to locate words and phrases in Rabindranath’s works
a collation engine to compare different versions of a work at three levels: chapter (in a long prose work) or act/scene (in a play); paragraph (in prose) or stanza (in verse); detailed wording
a checklist of the contents of each manuscript
a bibliography of all authoritative manuscript and print versions of each work
The project was co-ordinated by Sukanta Chaudhuri, Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University, with Sankha Ghosh, poet and former Professor of Bengali, Jadavpur University, as adviser. A team of 30 project staff worked for two years to process the material and create the website, alongside many other consultants, advisers and contributors. it can be accessed at http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php
• Famine and Dearth in India and Britain, 1550-1800
Funded by the AHRC, this project is led by Dr Ayesha Mukherjee (Principal Investigator, Department of English, University of Exeter) and Professor Amlan Das Gupta (Co-Investigator, Department of English and School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University), further assisted by the collaboration of Professor Azarmi Dukht Safavi and her team at the Institute of Persian Research, Aligarh Muslim University. The research for the project, carried out by Mukherjee (PI), and supported by the teams at Aligarh, Jadavpur, and Exeter, has uncovered multilingual primary sources and images relating to famine and dearth in India and Britain, 1550-1800, held in national and local archives and libraries in Britain, Bangladesh, and India. Selections from these sources have been transcribed and encoded by research fellows and interns at Jadavpur, Aligarh, and Exeter, who have worked with the Digital Humanities team at Exeter to create a website and database from the materials. Some of the vernacular sources have been translated into English by individual members of the project team. The Famine and Dearth database contains searchable transcriptions of over 700 multilingual primary sources relating to situations of famine and dearth in early modern India and Britain. The archive contains texts in ten different languages including Persian, Bengali and Hindi as well as English, and offers English translations for the majority of texts. These texts cover a wide range of genres, including chronicle histories, gazetteers, official correspondence, legislation, pamphlets, periodicals, plays, poetry, surveys, and fiction and non-fiction prose.The database has been published as part of the AHRC-funded project Famine and Dearth in India and Britain, 1550-1800. The content, textual apparatus, structure, and search functions of the database are therefore designed to enable users to explore the comparative potential of the material. There is also a rich body of scholarly work on the socio-economic contexts and literature of early modern Britain and Mughal India, which have been consulted during this project and are selectively listed in the bibliography. Duration of the Project: 2015-2017. The project can be accessed at https://famineanddearth.exeter.ac.uk/index.html
• Short Title Catalogue
The School has prepared a Short-Title Catalogue of Bengali books – the first in any Indian language. Each entry comprises a full bibliographical record plus complete title-page transcript (including typographical data) and location register. Work on the period 1800-1867 (approx. 3,500 entries) is complete, and the results placed on a website using a customized software. Metadata generation for over 1500 entries has been completed till now, including transcription of title-page data for most entries. There have been efforts to include easier keyword searches for new and old entries, evolve standards for phonetic consistency, and systematicise expression to facilitate easier navigation of entries.11 major libraries are covered, including the National Library, Asiatic Society, Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, Serampore College,Uttarpara Jaykrishna Library and British Library. The project has been supported by the UGC and the Bibliographical Society, UK. This project is supervised by Dr. Abhijit Gupta, Professor of English, Jadavpur University, and Joint-Director, SCTR. URL:http://www.compcon-asso.in/projects/biblio/welcome.php?redirect=/projects/biblio/index.php
• Hardy Manuscript Digitisation Project
The preparation of TEI-XML encoding of the 1878 University College Dublin manuscript of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native for a Thomas Hardy knowledge site project by Professor Tim Dolin of Curtin University.
• Charles Harpur Digitisation Project
The School collaborated with the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales,Australia, in producing a full critical edition of Charles Harpur, the19th-century Australian poet. The specific responsibility of the School was theintricate task of producing transcripts with XML-TEI mark-up of the Harpur manuscripts, made available to us in digital image files. The work has been completed, and the marked-up transmits passed on to our Australian partners for further processing.
• Prabhed
‘Prabhed’ (প্রভেদ) is a text processing software package by the School of Cultural Texts and Records. It is a software package which was made to work especially with Bengali and English fonts.
It is able to visualise the verbal changes an author made across versions of the same textual work. It is a digital tool which helps to process information from a vast data set in a systematic manner for a researcher to further his/ her arguments in textual criticism or other aspects of research where textual variation may hold significance.
It has been used in the Bichitra project for collating the works of Rabindranath Tagore. It carries out collation at three levels: ‘gross’ or macro-collation at Section and Segment levels, and ‘fine’ or micro-collation at Word level.
• Bengali Collation Software “PATHANTAR”
This is the first software developed in any language or alphabet other than the Roman (English) alphabet, for collation (textual comparison) of multiple texts.It is Unicode compliant. It can therefore easily be adapted to any other alphabet, including the Roman (for Tagores English writings), as well as other Indian languages. It holds out the possibility of a comprehensive database ofIndian literatures in times to come.
The software can, in theory, collate any number of texts. We have successfully ben able to collate eight variant texts of the play Bisarjan at the same time, with no detectable loss of speed. We use it in conjunction with the Unicode-compliant and phonetically scientific keyboard software “Avro”. A user-friendly interface has been designed by the School of EducationTechnology, Jadavpur University.
Important features of the software are:
1. It can display variations in punctuation as well as wording.
2. Any of the variant texts can be selected as base text.
3. It employs colour-coding and highlighting for easy identification of each variantsource.
We would claim that this is the most versatile collation software in any language, barring oneor two high-cost customized products, patented for specific projects and not otherwise available. It offers some features not available in the standard Roman-alphabet collation software “Juxta”.
The software is being radically redesigned in accord with the revolutionary newconcept of “Cortex”, or a single composite file incorporating all variantversions. We are developing this new version through interaction with its original developer, Loyola University, Chicago.
• Bilingual Database Software “Sarbanam”
The School has also sponsored the comprehensive, customized database software “Sarbanam”, which allows data storage, sorting and search using the Bengali aswell as the Roman alphabet, and diacritical marks in the latter. Data from separate heads or projects is stored on separate databases, under fields appropriate to the relevant material. Comprehensive searches may be undertaken across several or all the databases, using common fields or keywords.
• Endangered Archives Programme
The School has been awarded six projects under the British Library's Endangered Archives Programmes and is the archival partner for a seventh project in partnership with the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. This is the largest number of such projects granted to any single research unit in the world.
• EAP 071: Archiving texts in the Sylhet Nagri script
This project was awarded to Prof. Anuradha Chanda in 2006 and lasted for 12 months. It succeeded in locating, accessing and digitally storing 103 texts in the Sylhet Nagri script, a rich medium of composition and social exchange in the Sylhet-Cachar region. A script once widely used in north-eastern Bengal. This script evolved between the fourteenth and the seventeenth century as a simple alternative (only 32 letters; no conjuncts) to the standard Bengali script. Printed texts appeared in the 1870s and became immensely popular but declined in the last 50 years. The texts were located by undertaking field trips in the districts of Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi in South Assam and trips by road to Dharmanagar, Tripura from Silchar. In addition, institutions in and around Kolkata were searched and texts accessed in Jotindramohan Samgrahasala of National Council of Education, Bengal, Jadavpur, Kolkata. The endangered archival material is now housed at the School and the British Library, digital copies of the material are deposited with Gurucharan and Nehru Colleges of the Cachar region – the region from where the texts originate. A CD has been preparedof the texts of 25 works. The first scholarly edition of any such text (of the volume Pahela Kitab) has been published, and other volumes are in preparation. Details can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.15130/EAP071
• EAP 127: Archiving 'popular market' Bengali books
This was a major project awarded to Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri in 2007 and lasted 24 months. This project aimed to archive Bengali 'popular books' - street literature. They exist alongside elite publications, but are marketed through entirely different channels for a different readership: through the humbler type of bookshops, but more often through hawkers on roads, buses and trains, in stalls and village haats (temporary markets). The material covers such varied subjects as religion, folk culture, local history, popular literature, pornography and erotica, popular redactions of elite practices such as fashion and cookery, instruction on traditional rural pursuits such as agriculture and animal farming) and instruction on technical occupations such as repairing machinery and appliances, citizen's rights, law, government procedure, public hygiene and social reform. The books are of unique sociological interest, illustrating a changing society, culture and economy of Bengal at a popular level. The project digitised a total of 2,980 titles, comprising 96,973 images. Including Islamic kissa books, Oriya books written in Bengali script, from Nihar Press, Kanthi (Contai), a near-complete run of 'cinema booklets', a substantial body of similar 'theatre booklets'; and a large range of books (often with notation) of film songs and other popular songs. The digital copies will be available at the British Library and the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University. Details can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.15130/EAP127
• EAP 132: Digital archive of north Indian classical music
This major project was awarded to Prof. Amlan Das Gupta in 2007 for a duration of 24 months where it was attempted to archive recording from in and around Kolkata which has traditionally been one of the main centres of musical performance, patronage, commercial recording, and music collection. A major incentive to the circulation of classical music in Bengal was the arrival of the exiled Nawab of Avadh, Wajid Ali Shah, in Kolkata in the mid-nineteenth century. This supplemented existing practices of music patronage among aristocratic and affluent mercantile families of the region. Commercial recording began in Kolkata and the city continued to be the hub of activity for the Gramophone Company until the 1960s. In the mid 20th century, the majority of the most important public concerts were regularly held in Kolkata and nearby towns at which all the greatest artists of the country regularly performed. Approximately 2780 tracks were digitised, amounting to about 1.1 terabytes. Work was done on a number of major collections, notably those in the possession of Anindya Banerjee, Ashis Bhadra and Sarbari Ray Chaudhuri, K P Mukherjee; the family of the late Pulin Pal, Steve Lansberg; the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, as well as from a number of smaller, but very valuable, collections in the possession of other collectors. A full set of digital recordings is with the School and another the British Library. Each collector has been given a set of digital copies of the music contributed in the format preferred. Details of the collection can be found at https://doi.org/10.15130/EAP132
• EAP 261: Digital archive of early Bengali drama
This major project was awarded to Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri in 2009 and lasting 18 months digitised a wide collection of rare and unique material of, and on, Bengali drama held by a private collector, Dr Devajit Bandyopadhyay. The collection covers the 19th and early 20th centuries. It covers three main areas of Bengali drama:
1. 'Formal' Bengali drama on Western models for the urban theatre: volumes of single play-texts, collections of play-texts, and studies. This wide variety of volumes also has a wide range of publishers, formal and informal. Many items were produced for private distribution only. Many others are made unique by virtue of the signatures, marginalia, or other manuscript insertions they contain.
2. 'Jatra' or traditional Bengali folk theatre: this is a uniquely large collection of such texts, covering all major types, mythological, historical and socio-political. They are much closer to the tradition of oral transmission so that any printed documentation is of special value.
3. There is also a large body of dramatic songbooks, with and without notation. Drama provided a chief platform for songwriting and the development of new musical conventions. This collection contains some extremely rare volumes of theatrical and other songs, including unique manuscript volumes of material not known from other sources.
249 titles have been digitised and listed, some of them multi-volume, making a total of 385 volumes and a total of 112,174 images. Digital copies have been deposited with the British Library and the School. Another set of copies has been given to Dr Bandyopadhyay. Details can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.15130/EAP261
• EAP 274: Digital music archiving: Digital archive of North Indian classical music: phase II (special collections) and digital archive of recorded Bengali songs
The Digital Music Archiving Project awarded to Prof Amlan Das Gupta in 2009 for a duration of 24 months was a combination of two separate projects
1. Digital Archive of North Indian Classical Music: Phase II with emphasis on Special Collections
The Digital Archive of North Indian Classical Music was initiated in 2004 as part of the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. The aim at inception was to create a collection of digitised recordings of North Indian classical music, and by 2007 a collection of about 1,000 hours was digitised, catalogued and made available. This new project will concentrate on performances of artists usually under-represented in large general collections.
2. Digital Archive of Bengali Songs
This part of the project will digitise a collection of Bengali songs from 78rpm shellac disc records. The kind of material to be digitised consists of all types of popular (non-classical) Bengali songs, such as folk, devotional, romantic, comic, songs from theatre and complete musical dramas in the folk tradition etc. Many of these songs actually go back to the 19th century but have been put in recorded form only in the 20th. The project preserved materials from the oldest and most valuable portion of the collection, from 1902 to 1937.
The project succeeded in digitising 16 collections in whole or part, contributed by private collectors, musicologists and musicians. This totalled 6,860 tracks amounting to 1,670 hours of listening time. A digital copy is housed at the School and also the British Library. In addition, individual collectors have received a copy of their material. Details can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.15130/EAP274
• EAP 922: Digitisation and conservation of endangered paper records of the British Indian Association
This major project was warded to Dr Nilanjana Deb in 2016 and lasted for 24 months. This project aimed to digitise for open online access the most important holdings of the British Indian Association, Kolkata. The Association, set up in 1851, was one of the earliest and most important platforms from which Indians engaged with the British in India. Its holdings include records of its own history and activities as well as other issues, viz. correspondence, memoranda, minutes, reports submitted to various bodies and legal documents.Its own records, and its holdings of early newspapers and print material, are an invaluable source for the study of colonial relations in India from mid-19th to early 20th century, and the prehistory of the Indian freedom movement.The material includes unique records of its own history and activities as well as other issues, and correspondence, memoranda, minutes, reports submitted to various bodies and legal documents. There are also rare printed works both in Bengali and English, and runs of newspapers, including 'Forward', 'Hindoo Patriot', 'The Bengalee' and 'The Englishman'. The material dates from 1851-c.1930. The total holdings have been estimated to be in excess of 1,000,000 pages and the project resulted in 66,882 images (amounting to 3.66TB). Details can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.15130/EAP922
• EAP1247: Songs of the Old Madmen: Recovering Baul Songs from the Note-Books of 19th and 20th Century Bengali Saint-Composers
This major project was awarded to Dr. Carola Lorea of the host institution, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore with the School of Cultural Texts and Records as the archival partner in 2019 and had a duration of 15 months. The songs of the Bauls are composed by gurus or spiritual teachers and performed by itinerant folk musicians. They are transmitted among low-caste communities in India and Bangladesh, where they are recognized as intangible cultural heritage. An encyclopaedia of beliefs and practices, Baul songs discuss ideas on cosmogony, health, sexuality, meditation and everyday life. This project aims to digitize 10.000 hand-written songs from the personal note-books of influential singers/songwriters of the Baul tradition, located with their lineage descendants in West Bengal (India). It also aims to locate endangered note-books of important gurus to protect other corpora of songs in the future. This project has achieved the preservation and digitisation of 13 handwritten notebooks of Baul songs, three albums of correspondence between guru and disciple, historical documents, and numerous photographs of Baul performers and their families which have been found within the pages of the notebooks. Details can be accessed at https://dx.doi.org/10.15130/EAP1247
• Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts
The School has been previously supported by a grant from IGNCA which enabled us to digitise collections like Arun Kumar Sarkar Papers, Ashoka Gupta Papers, Badal Sircar Papers, Buddhadeva Bose Papers, Jyotirmoyee Debi and Saibal Gupta Papers, Shakti Chattopadhyay Papers, Tapan Sinha Film scripts, The Comic Book in India and various other projects.
• Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai
The School was awarded a grant from the Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai as part of the Collaborative Project on Digitization of South Asian Archival Resources between the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University and the British Library, UK.
• ABP India
ABP Limited entrusted the School with digitising the correspondence received by the late Sagarmay Ghosh, the legendary editor of the magazine Desh. This collection includes items from nearly all major Bengali writers across the generations,and a great quantity of other material. They constitute a treasure-house of information on modern Bengali literary history.
• Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies
The School was invited to digitise the holdings of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, which included a significant portion of picture album collection and a large portion of textual collection as books and journals from early ninetinth century to mid- twentieth century. Among it has been found texts on an extensive range of topics such as music, art and culture, history,politics and social issues, correspondance etc. two correspondences between Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Kiran Shankar Roy have been found. Some of these texts are in the Nastaliq ( Persian, Urdu, Arabic ), Nagri (Hindi)and Bangla scripts. The project was partially supported by the ‘University with Potential for Excellence-Phase II’ scheme of the University Grants Commission, India.
• University with Potential for Excellence (UPE Scheme, Phase I and II)
The School carried out multiple digitisation projects under the University with Potential for Excellence scheme under both Phase I and II. Some of the projects were: Physical Cultures of Bengal, Dinen Gupta Collection, Bichitra Phase II, Collection of Bengali Periodicals including Batayan, Chitralekha, Dipali, Kheyali, Sachitra Sisir, Damayanti Basu Singh's Kavita collection, Shahid Amin Archive, Amiya Bagchi Collection, Prodosh Bhattacharya Collection, Mihir Purakayastha Collection, Tarun Pain Collection, James Stevenson Collection, Andre Laszlo Collection, Katharina Moss collection, among others.
• RUSA 2.0
The School of Cultural Texts and Records has been associated with three projects under the RUSA 2.0 from 2019 to 2020.
• Shabdakalpa
Under RUSA 2.0, the School is creating a historical dictionary of the Bengali language. It aims to document the evolution of Bengali words across the time. This is the first initiative of its kind in any Indian language. The project is using computational methods to trace the origin and consequent use of the words chronologically in its formal or colloquial form.
• Jibanananda Das Papers
The SCTR had acquired an invaluable collection of manuscripts of poet Jibanananda Das. They comprise more than 9,000 pages, approx. half consisting of original manuscripts, the rest photocopies of manuscripts stored elsewhere. Of the original manuscripts, a substantial part appears never to have been published. Under the RUSA 2.0, the SCTR is digitizing and transcribing the manuscripts with relevant metadata towards an online variorum. Until the end of the project all 9,232 pages were digitised and out of the 100 manuscripts held by the SCTR only 15 were transcribed.
• Conservation, Digitization, and Metadata Creation of Rare and Endangered Recordings of Indian Classical Music
Under RUSA 2.0 the Music Archive at the School digitised rare and endangered audio documents of Hindustani classical music of James Stevenson Collection. This collection contains audio cassettes of performances of Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Vilayat Hussain Khan, Pyara Sahib, C. R. Vyas, Salamat and Nazakat Ali Khan, Ramkrishnabua Vaze, Malini Rajurkar, Bundu Khan (Sarangi), Lalmani Mishra (Veena), Mian Qadir Baksh (Tabla), D. K. Datar (Violin), Gopal Mishra (Sarangi), Hafiz Ali Khan (Sarod). The Collection also has rare interviews and live performances. In the project from September 2019 to March 2020 approximately 250 hours were digitised following the international (IASA) standards i.e. 96 kHz at 24 bits – appropriate metadata and ancillary information were also generated of the same.
